


your dreams and your hopeless hair

by illiadus



Category: League of Legends RPF
Genre: Eventual Smut, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mystery, Slow Build, supernatural fic - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-22
Updated: 2017-08-30
Packaged: 2018-09-26 07:07:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 34,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9872822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illiadus/pseuds/illiadus
Summary: Will Hartman had been Zachary's best friend, right up until he vanished- presumed dead. As the fourth anniversary of his death rolls around, all Zach wants is to finish his senior year, graduate, and never come back to Kansas. Unfortunately for him, life (and death) is rarely so simple.





	1. Chapter 1

The memorial service was always awkward. 

Zachary Scuderi always felt at his heaviest the night before, when he looked outside at the sun setting and realised he couldn’t pretend that it wasn’t happening again. Like clockwork every year since his best friend had died. Had been officially presumed to be dead. Had gone missing for so long they threw a funeral. However Zach sliced that cake, it didn’t change that the icing was made out of pure shit. 

They practically had it down to an art by this point. Zachary would come home from school like usual on May 12th. He would try very hard not to feel like more eyes were upon him than usual. Maryville, Kansas was a small town where very little happened, let alone a fifteen-year-old vanishing without a trace. He gave himself a free pass on his homework, dicked around on the internet, ate dinner. His parents would skate around the topic of what tomorrow symbolised. He let himself sink into the fantasy for a few minutes. The windows of the house at the end of their road weren’t boarded up, they shone with warmth- a family inside the walls. Will Hartman was waiting at the manhole cover that they had spent an afternoon in the summer calculating as exactly equidistant between their houses. Maybe he had his skateboard. Zach could never finish his dinner that evening, and fully expected for the fourth year running to slope upstairs with half of his plate going cold on the family dinner table. His parents would let him get on with it.

His little sister Emily would come into his room and hug him quickly. She never specified why exactly, she just wrapped her skinny arms around him and squeezed as hard as she could. She would pat him on the head and give him a watery smile. She would leave. Zach would stare at the wall for a while, and daydream until his phone beeped. Hai ‘Ever the Ringleader’ Lam would text him as the sun faded into a warm mid-Spring dusk. The four of them would go and drink enough for five up on the hill, just outside the neighbourhood. Last year they had talked about Will a little for the first time, holding their own little memorial in a sense. It had felt like progress.

Unfortunately Zachary was making little progress in his AP Computing. If little was equivalent to ‘zero’. He rubbed his brow, the dust of the high school computer room making his eyes feel dry and pinched. He checked his watch; five thirty, on the 12th of May 2014. The code in front of him was looking blurry and he could feel a migraine pinching on his temples like probing fingers. He scoffed in disgust and started shovelling his notebooks into his bag. Stupid subject. He liked _the internet_ not ‘computers’. He could scrape a passing grade in it if he finished this coursework by the end of the month. He wondered if he would get called into the principal’s office tomorrow, as had become tradition. 

After the memorial Principal Patterson would call him into his office and gently enquire about his emotional wellbeing. Zach would thank him for his concern, and assure him he was doing fine. After that he would slam his fist into a tile, or simply just cry in the bathroom for three and a half minutes, before taking the rest of the day off to sit in his room and stare at the wall until May 14th rolled around. 

The walk home only took 15 minutes, the late afternoon sun filtering through the birch trees that lined his walk from the high school to his house. Zach felt like he was having a small out-of-body experience, or maybe just a short existential crisis. He couldn’t separate the two timelines on days like today; there was a world where nothing bad ever happened to William Hartman. His legs felt wobbly as he trekked the same trail he did every day, imagining that Will was with him. Taller, probably. Less obnoxious, probably not. He wondered if Will was still alive, would he refuse to step on cracks in the pavement still? How much of the boy he knew would remain in the man he could have been today? Zach’s throat felt impossibly dry.

He cut across the fields, as they always did. A small, snide part of his brain accused him of being a masochist. Imaginary, ghostly figures ran across the vista in his mind. They had played here for years- Cops and Robbers, Pokemon, World of Warcraft, (after both of their moms banned them from computer games for a week after reading an article in the local paper about how it ‘stunted’ kids), making dens, climbing trees, stealing beers, proudly showing their friends the shitty den they had made when they were thirteen, smoking their first joint. Zach felt the sudden urge to start running. He wanted to outstrip how fast the inevitable crush of time caught up with him. He wanted to sprint like a kid again. He wanted to double over and heave with tears because he knew ‘childhood’ was something synonymous with ‘Will’ and both of those things were lost to him. 

But he didn’t run. He walked the length of the field and started down the block the other side at the same pace, trying not to hyperventilate. He checked his watch; five-forty on the 12th of May 2014. Zach tried not to sigh. He knew this was going to be long evening. Everyday Will lurked, behind postboxes and in half-heard laughs, but today he was everywhere. Zach could scarcely glance around without some memory rearing it’s head: the red hydrant that Will had cracked his tooth on trying to jump over on the corner of Cherrywell, the kerb that Will had bought weed from Michael Santana on whilst Zach lurked around the corner, ready to leap out and pretend to be a cop at the first sign of trouble. The apple tree blossoming on the apex of the street corner that they had sat under when Will had been crying about his parents’ divorce. That had been a handful of weeks before his disappearance. Zach found himself listless by the tree, staring at a viridian apple slowly rotting on the grass. Sickly yellow decomposing into verdant green under the watchful sun. He thought about Will’s palm, burning hot pressed against his own and how he had cried with his face pressed into Zach’s shoulder, tears drying in salty tracks on the fabric of his jumper. The entire neighbourhood was paved with memories, great and small, of Will Hartman. Zach felt the itch under his skin that flared up whenever he thought about starting college in the fall in Pittsburgh. It demanded to be scratched, even moreso on days like today. Maryville was an idyllic place in theory, but for him it was a minefield, a honeyed poison. Every beautiful view was a painful reminder that there was someone missing out on it. That the world where nothing bad happened to Will Hartman was not the one that Zach was living in.

***

The sound of a lawnmower spluttering to life sent a jolt through me and I tried to stifle my squeak of embarrassment. I walked home quickly, trying not to think about the salt-slick sniff of a boy crying or the kite we stuck in my neighbour’s tree that I know will be there if I look up. I look up, helplessly. I can hear a ringing in my ears, it sounds exactly how Will would laugh when I got startled. I remember the month-long obsession with the jump-scares when we were thirteen, scarcely bearable at the time. It’s really hard not to think about how much I yearn for that, the absolute lowlight of our friendship. The kite is purple. I can remember that I wanted blue and Will wanted red so we compromised. I wish I could snap at him, call him an idiot, tell him if he jumps out on me from behind his door again I’ll make him eat it. 

It takes me an extra minute of fiddling to pull out my keys and unlock the door because my eyes are blurring with unshed tears. I wonder why I feel so much less sturdy than I did this time last year, but then I consider that maybe every time it’s over, I try hard not to remember it until next mid-May. I move through mechanical operations because they’re easier than considering my progress through the grieving process. Keys go in the bowl, I move a stack of letters from the doorstep to the coffee table, peek into the living room. Emily is there, watching TV and eating toast. I open my mouth to say hi, but only a creaky sound comes out and I decide that I want to be alone for a while, rather than distress my little sister with any crying outbursts. 

I go upstairs and I don’t have any crying outbursts. I’m not really surprised, I never did. Even the first night, when a dour-faced man in a police hat came over and asked if I had seen my friend Will since yesterday, and my mom cried after they left. I put the pieces together and sat upstairs, numbed. After I started frantically printing posters with Will’s face emblazoned across them and it sank in that my best friend could actually be gone, I curled up in a cupboard in the copy room for an hour. Two weeks after that, it became apparent that he wasn’t going to come back. I sat in our den for almost an entire day and didn’t speak to a soul. Four years ago today, I had sat on the same spot on this bed and contemplated the purpose of a funeral with an empty casket. It still hurt. It still stuck like a tiny bone that would never dislodge itself from the side of my throat. I hadn’t given up. Why did everyone else have to?

I tried to solve the mystery of what happened to Will on eleven separate occasions, to varying degrees of success. Last year had felt like a strange kind of turning point. At school we had started mentioning Will in conversation again, like he was an absent friend on an international exchange or something- the permanent kind that meant he was never coming home and we had to talk about him in the past tense. But nevertheless, it had made a difference. Will Hartman was no longer a taboo subject. I felt in control again for a while, like I could turn remembering off and on. Now I feel seasick, tossed about by a vortex of memories. The facets have splintered off the wall and are spraying, the water is filling up the room and I’m drowning. 

I take a deep breath. I am not drowning. The ringing in my ears does not sound like the laugh of a fifteen-year-old. I am fine. I toss myself backwards onto my bed and grab my laptop, the warmth of the hard-drive of my stomach weighing me down into reality. I click around idly, eager for a distraction from my indefinitely increasing migraine. I manage to lose myself in a forum on recent game releases until I hear a fracas from downstairs.

“Zach! Zach honey, could you come and help me with this shopping?” The sounds of the door opening and closing filter up the stairs into my room and I sigh half-heartedly, a huge part of me grateful for the opportunity to break up the monotony of scrolling, opening tabs, closing tabs, skimming other people’s boring opinions on games I will probably never buy. I check my watch as I clunk down the stairs and grab the three shopping bags by the door, carrying them into the kitchen. It is five past six, on May 12th 2014. My mom is humming and sorting the groceries, and I feel the overwhelming urge to hug her. 

“Thank you, where would I be without my big strong son huh?” She says, kissing me on the top of the head, cupping my face fondly before she starts unpacking them. I know well as she does that I’m short and on the chubby side, but my retort gets stuck somewhere between my throat and vocal chords as I wonder where Will’s mom is, without her son. Instead I chuckle half-heartedly and shift from foot to foot, wondering whether to make an escape. I don’t really want to help with dinner, but on the other hand sitting in my room alone with only the ghost of my dead best friend for company was beginning to become too oppressive. 

“Do you want some help making dinner?” I hear a strange, robotic voice saying. I’m sure it came from me, but it sounds so fragile and alien I can’t be sure. My mom looks at me a little strangely, like I had just asked whereabouts to lay my next batch of eggs.

“Sure, why not? I was just going to make chili for when your father gets home. Are you alright sweetheart?”

I nod, the compassion in her voice making my heart clench. I don’t resist at all when she wraps her arms around me. I cling to her a little bit, trying not to cry.

“It’s okay, baby. I know tomorrow is always a horrible day. But it’s good to remember Will, right?”

I want to tell her that my head is so full of Will right now it could burst. There isn’t space for anything else, not breathing, not thinking about the future. I am rooted to a sidewalk, a hundred metres away in space but years, what feels now like centuries ago in time, waiting for a best friend who is never coming back. I hug her extra-tightly for three more seconds, my mom’s regular scent of rose-based perfume and acrylic glues from the nail bar she works in washing over me like a gentle rain after a drought. I remember what Will smelt like every time I hugged him; lavender detergent, pine needles, sweat, something else warm and intangible that was uniquely his.

I wipe my eyes and start slicing carrots. 

***

Logically, you know that there is plenty of air in the room. If push came to shove, you could explain the concept of oxygen, its molecular structure and behaviour, and how it is absorbed into your lungs. None of this basic conception of science explains why you cannot breathe. It is a regular family dinner, the kind you usually enjoy. But today it feels like a big lie and the parade of normality is suffocating you. Your little sister is nattering away, about English class and hockey and her friends. You feel the overwhelming urge to wrap her in cotton wool and keep her like this forever, her greatest worry the next Varsity game. A special kind of cotton wool that keeps away horror and violence and great unending mysteries that break up families and wake up kids, with nightmares that their best friend is somewhere, screaming and in dire need of help you don’t know how to give. The chili is tasteless, and your culinary talents are severely lacking if the unusually chunky carrots floating about in it are anything to go by. At the end of the table you can tell your dad is watching you carefully, anxiety colouring every line in his taut smile. He worries about you so much, you can hear it in every probing question he asks about your studies and non-existent extracurriculars. _And non-existent friends_ a mean voice adds somewhere in your brain. 

You eat a little more, feeling guilty. The evening feels like it has been blocked out on a stage years ago by a blind crew; Emily never lets silence settle, mom reassures you, dad is stoic and there if you need him. They all have roles, catering to you, the variable. You are the bomb they are tiptoeing around and you know it. You pick at your plate, determined to eat at least some of your meal. Everything seems to take longer to chew than usual and sticks to either side of your oesophagus on the way down. You glance at your watch. It is almost seven on May 12th 2014. Your mom and dad are discussing what time to go to the florists at the weekend. Their voices are like sounds from the other end of a conch shell, distant and indistinct. You take a sip of water and your hand is shaking, beads of liquid dancing around inside the old plastic tumbler. Your dad frowns and offers you a beer. You decline and go upstairs on autopilot.

You taste copper in the back of your throat as you close your door gently. You feel your knees buckle and you kneel, helpless and crying. Now the tears come in earnest, dribbling hot down your cheeks. Every year like clockwork, this was the worst bit. You press your fist into your lips and sob silently. Everything is so disconnected, unreal. You feel like you aren’t even a person. Looking back at you in the full-length mirror, propped by the end of your desk, is a strange boy with a round face, contorted by tears. Long hair frames big, blue, vacant eyes that you cannot understand. You let yourself fold over and feel everything. All of your sorrow is so real and tangible it physically hurts, you are being strangled by the overwhelming feeling of loss and sadness and anger. Your rib-cage feels like it might splinter in half with how irrevocably heavy your heart feels. Outside, the sun sets.

Your sister finds you like that, curled up on the floor. You don’t even have the energy to feel ashamed any more. Your head feels impossibly light, like you’ve dislodged something inside it with the sheer force of tears produced.

“Hey.” She kneels down in front of you. “I know this sucks so much, every year. But mom and dad and I love you loads, okay Zach? I miss Will too, but don’t give up hope, okay Zach?” It breaks your heart how gently she speaks to you, like she’s coaxing a baby bird out of its nest for the first time. You look up at her and want to burst with pride at the wonderful person she is growing into. You barely even resent how she yearns to protect you, all of your brotherly instincts thrown into disarray by the sudden outburst of emotion.

You accept your hug, trying not to tremble too obviously in her grip. She smiles at you, a big reassuring grin, and leaves, closing the door behind her. You sit up a little, your previous theatrics feeling a bit macabre and silly now. Your phone beeps from the pocket of your jacket, splayed across your bed next to your laptop. On the one hand you hope it’s a text from Hai, but on the other a strange trepidation burns in the pit of your stomach. You wouldn’t say you had become a loner in the last year, but you have definitely become more lonely. Eating lunch with Hai, An and Daerek had become something you did once a week, as opposed to every day. You wonder if your distance is going to be a factor in your part of the memorial, the only part that ever felt truly important, like Will would have wanted it. 

***  
I thought about it carefully as I walked towards the mailbox on the end of Frith Avenue. It was hard to pinpoint exactly when I had become more distant with my friends. It wasn’t like I had replaced them with anyone, I had a smattering of people I spoke to in my classes I would call ‘friends’ besides them. I began to wonder if I had just withdrawn altogether over the past year. I couldn’t call when I had started going home during free periods and lunch breaks over the past year, but it had become my routine without me even noticing it. I wondered if Daerek and An had noticed. I didn’t doubt that Hai had, Hai was disturbingly perceptive even when we were little more than children.

As I rounded the corner they were all exactly where I expected them to be; An sitting on top of the mailbox, Hai leaning against it, Daerek standing on the kerb next to them. It seemed like some gross tableau of times gone by, I could see each of them as their younger selves in the same poses. An hadn’t grown much, but he was bulkier now. He still screwed up his nose when he laughed in the exact same way he had since I met him as an eleven year old. Hai on the other hand had skyrocketed in height but was still skinny, all angles and bones. Daerek was a year older and had grown an impressive beard during his final year of high school. I tried to remember when he had got new glasses, but I figured it had escaped my notice over the past year. 

“Hey Sneakers!” Hai called over as An hopped off the box.

I replied with a cautious, “hey” as I approached. My voice still sounded undisguisedly twisted and strange from crying to my own ears.

Daerek slapped me on the back genially as soon as I was within arms length. “How are you dude?”

I pressed my mouth into a thin line. “Been better, you?”

Daerek answered my question with one of his own. “Want a beer?”

“Desperately.” I replied, cracking a wry grin.

We traipsed up to the hill on the far side of the town dump. It was secluded, Will’s mom had always worried about us going up here and ‘getting in trouble’ and not being able to get help. The irony of it makes my gut twist now. It had always felt like our own little kingdom. We had needed the space on the first year. I had been about to turn fifteen and got so wasted I almost didn’t make it to Will’s funeral the next day. The year after that had been just as raw. We had all gotten trashed and cried in each other’s arms, the same as the year following that.

I groaned as we reached the top of the hill and flopped down. It made my stomach clench that we still sat in the same formation as we used to, familiarity seared into our brains. Hai, then An, then me, then a small gap, then Daerek. The small gap gaped like a chasm, but in another sense it comforted me. The others hadn’t forgotten about Will either. We splayed about, the warm evening laden with a nice breeze. A silence hung in the air, pregnant and irreproachable. 

Hai burst into a flurry of saying what we were all thinking. “I just hate the memorial service so much. First the fucking superintendent of all people, the guy who suspended Will twice, gives a speech about how great he was-”  


“Then the orchestra plays something garbage that he would have hated, with zero trombone in it. I mean, the band should be doing that for sure.” I interjected, glad to finally be able to air my incensed feelings.

An nodded vigorously. “The band should play a rousing rendition of Smash Mouth’s ‘All Star’. It’s what Will would have wanted.”

We all laugh for a moment, but it fades quickly, like it gets stale the second it hits the air. My voice doesn’t sound like my own when I speak quietly. “I wish we at least had a body to bury. I wish I at least knew what happened to him.” It all comes out in a rush, tight and strangled. It feels odd to externalise these thoughts. 

Hai nods. “I know what you mean. A part of me still really wants to believe he’s out there somewhere, but…”

“It’s been four years.” Daerek says, his older, slightly deeper voice bringing me back down to earth with its sombre tone.

He doesn’t say what is playing through all of our minds; how could a kid possibly survive undetected for four years? It isn’t possible, not unless Will has been enduring hell. I have the private, painful dilemma in my head about which would be better, Will dead or Will undergoing kidnap, torture, God knows what. I land on ‘dead’, just like I always do, just like the police and Will’s parents did. It’s the only explanation that makes sense.

The lull in conversation is punctuated by sips from beer cans and An tossing an empty down the hill. It hits three stones on its journey down, each resonating with a clang. I try to exhale the heavy feeling collecting in my lungs but it just won’t shift. It is eased only by the knowledge that all three of the men I am sitting with contain the same suffocating sixteen-year-old inside them that I do, and talking around their screams is hard. I wonder if they’re the only people who will every truly understand me, who witnessed and accepted that in some senses I was half a person when Will was alive, and now I am a person trying to become whole. I have come close, very close indeed, but only by sleepwalking through my high school life. It must be really obvious to my close friends I’ve never even tried to build another relationship in my life resembling the one I shared with Will. I finish my beer and Daerek hands me another. He clears his throat.

“I’ve applied to Dartmoor.”

“Pittsburgh.” I supplied.

Hai shrugged. “K-state, probably”

“Queens,” An added, “I can’t wait to leave.”

“How come?” Hai asks, popping the tab on his next beer.

An shrugged. “Well most days I can, but today I wish I were anywhere else.”

“Anywhere with less memories.” I mumble it, but everyone hears me.

“I miss him too, everyday man.” Daerek says, kindly.

I try not to sniff. “I don’t miss him everyday. I definitely think about him everyday. Just dumb stuff, like ‘oh, Will would like that if he lived to see it exist’, like it’s just a fact of life.”

“He would love Chipotle.”

“And Omegle.”

“He would definitely rag on all the latest WoW updates.”

“Do you think he would have kept bleaching his hair?” Hai wondered aloud.

I snorted with laughter. “Fuck I hope not. He used to do it at mine every time! I had zero nice bath towels.” I could remember the cloying smell of bleach as a mainstay in the bathroom I shared with Emily for months.

“He would have kept it up if Ms Kellerburg had kept trying to give him detention for it, just to spite her.” An said sagely. “He hated that woman so much.”  
I laughed some more, and every time it felt more natural. Will was a lot of things, but for the most part he was a clown. I imagined how unimpressed he would be by how dour I had been about his death for the past four years.

“Will wanted us to laugh. He dedicated ninety-nine percent of his time to it.” Hai said, a little sadly but tapping into my thoughts exactly.

An snickered. “What was the other percent?”

“Jacking it.” I replied with confidence.

We chatted idly, getting gradually drunker. Conversation meandered around Will, high school, video games and general shit-talk. An challenged Daerek to wrestle and won by a significant margin.

We packed up when the moon was highest in the sky. I checked my watch, quarter to midnight on the 12th of March.

“Thanks for doing this guys, I don’t think I could hack tonight alone.” Daerek said, sincerely but stumbling.

“Hopefully I’ve drunk enough beer to slip into a horrible, tipsy, uneven slumber.” I agreed, almost staggering down the hill myself.

“Tomorrow first thing, yeah?” Hai said, strategising even whilst rolling a blunt and paying no attention to where he put his feet.

“Meet up at basecamp?” An asked with a knowing grin.

I laughed. It felt right to call our spot under the bleachers ‘basecamp’ again. I had distanced myself from my closest friends without even meaning to and I feel a sinking guilt for it, but I feel hopeful. I will pass AP Computing, I will be less flaky on my friends, I will leave Maryville in a few short months and everything will be different. Not necessarily better, but different, and that is enough for me right now.

***

Zach walked home across deep leylines that held the landscape together for him. The route they used to take every week; through the dump, past Hai and Daerek’s houses, up and round to drop off An, then the final stretch back to where he and Will lived. Now where only he lived. The night air was warm and clouds stretched over the sky like gossamer, lit up by the pearly moon. An gave him the butt-end of the joint to smoke and he puffed it lazily as he sauntered back to his house, slightly intoxicated and feeling a little more safe in his own skin. Tomorrow he would wake up, probably vomit, and then try and live out the day in as normal of a fashion that could be expected. 

The floral taste of weed seeped through to make the edges of the evening a little hazier, blurrier, kinder. Will wasn’t lurking in wait, just this once he was walking alongside Zach. He wondered glibly if it was healthy to have imaginary conversations with his dead best friend. He decided it was problematic at best, but he was a little stoned and drunk and willing to give himself the benefit of the doubt. He giggles to himself, remembering the first time Will bleached his hair in Zach’s bathroom, an act of defiance aimed at no one in particular. 

It was hard to gauge what would Will say if he could see him now. If he just sauntered out from behind a conspicuous lamp post and struck up conversation;  
“You didn’t grow much, huh?”  
“Still cute Zach, classic little lesbian.”  
“I’m sorry for disappearing.”  
The high-pitched whine Will made whilst he was trying not to cry seemed to reverberate in time to the electric throb of the powerlines overhead Zach wondered if this was what a mentally stable person would do.

“I miss you so much.”

He murmured to the empty street. He glanced upwards to catch a glimpse of their kite, some lingering, concrete evidence that Will Hartman was not always a person who exclusively existed in Zach’s head. It was gone. He started, dropping the embers of the joint in shock. That kite had been lodged between the largest bough and set of skeletal branches for almost eight years. Zach felt the bottom of his soul drop out for a long moment, before he saw the frail twist of metal sticking up from the grass. It had fallen back into the land of the living. A host of emotions tore through him. _I should bury the kite. I should burn it. I should put it in a glass cabinet where no one else can touch it._ He let his slightly drunken fingers feel down every weather-beaten nook and cranny of the kite, it’s thin metallic spine split and broken. The fabric frayed and sun-bleached violet. Zach bundled the kite into his arms and took it inside with him, putting it on his desk. He doesn’t feel its presence like a spectre, like a living, breathing part of Will Hartman standing over his whilst he sleeps. It feels natural, like laying a part of him to rest. Like something coming full circle. Like a memento of a time past, as opposed to one snatched away from him. 

Zach drifted to sleep uneasily, dreaming of pine needles and splintered teeth and hands so hot they scalded his skin to hold.


	2. Chapter 2

The memorial was awkward.

They met under the bleachers as promised, the former ‘basecamp’ slightly overrun by a group of goths catching their morning cigarette. Zach squirmed a little under their gaze. He felt overtly dorky in his layered roll neck and overshirt. Hai was already there when he arrived, fiddling with a new earring that dangled halfway down his neck.

“Hah, yeah I did it last night with my sister. Didn’t really feel like sleeping. She isn’t back at college until next month and took full advantage of me being kind of drunk and on Tumblr.” He rambled in response to Zach’s raised eyebrows.

Zach relished the opportunity to roll his eyes. “You actually want to look like an anime character, don’t you?” 

“Shut up man, I think it looks cool!” Hai crowed back, shamelessly striking some classic Sailor Moon poses.

“Hai Lam, captain of the volleyball team and actual real-life weeb.” Zach cackled to himself, waving to An and Daerek as they made their way over. Daerek Hart wasn’t technically a student at Maryville High any more, having graduated the year earlier and taken a year out to ‘build a portfolio’ or ‘dick around on the internet’ as his mom put it when she came over for coffee at the Scuderi’s. Principal Patterson however had seen it as a worthy investment and had employed Daerek to build their school’s website.

“He _shook my hand_ at the end of the meeting dude, and then he invited me to the memorial and called me _Mr Hart_. I have no idea how to say no to that.” Daerek whined, nervously rubbing his hand through his beard as the foursome meandered their way through the parking lot to the school building.

“Damn if I’d known all it took for you to do whatever I want was call you ‘Mr Hart’ I would have started doing it a long time ago.” Hai said, smirking.

“Oh Mr Hart, would you lick my balls?” Zach enquired, his face the picture of innocence. It boded well he felt, walking into the main building of the school laughing together.

“Do you think I need like, a visitor’s badge? I don’t want them to think I’m some creepy old man come to menace freshman.” Daerek fretted as they passed their first gaggle of teachers heading towards the auditorium. The pedestrian traffic was rapidly thickening.

An snickered, “just don’t violate any tweens then! You graduated last year man, not the sixties! The lunch ladies probably still remember you.”

Zach was crushed against a set of lockers by some rambunctious sophomores on their way into the heart of the smallish high school, along with An. They both simultaneously tutted with annoyance, caught each other’s eye and laughed. A light bulb flickered to life in Zach’s brain for the first time in what felt like months. _Sometimes shit things can be okay because you experience them with your friends._ He smiled to himself and waved to Hai who was waiting for them a little further down the hall, where it was emptier. The crowd in the hallway down there was not at all thick enough to disguise the skinny boy behind them thrashing around, being shoved into his locker by four larger, far broader kids. Zach cringed as his bony shoulder smashed into the brittle metal of the locker door. He thought about saying something. He was a senior after all. A small part of his mind was simply screaming that today, of all days, he had to stand up for that kid.

Zach couldn’t count the number of fights he had started on his hands, because that number was a firm zero and that isn’t a number you can count to with any number of hands. He wasn’t big on physical confrontation, but he’d definitely been beaten up more than he would like. At first, mostly because Will was stupid and valiant in middle school and had always gotten himself into trouble with other kids. The first year of highschool however, that had come around to bite them both. Will was loud by nature, and didn’t mind confrontation of any kind in the slightest. He didn’t seem to mind getting punched in the face for telling someone to step off, or getting his books tipped out of his hands in the hallway. He revelled in it almost, he loved to make the his assailants feel stupid, insecure, uncomfortable. He fought back with demeaning words and scathing retorts; bruises healed but being mocked by a skinny kid with four friends stayed with you.

Zach’s most poignant memory of the first two weeks of high school was in the canteen, after a broad-shouldered kid in a letterman jacket had barged past Will in the middle of the walkway. There was a beat of silence after the tray hit the floor, when all eyes were on them. Zach stood next to him, stock-still and unsure of whether to stay quiet or throw his tray down in solidarity. As it turned out Will didn’t need his theatrics, he had his own.

“Jeez Jonathan, there are way nicer ways to let me know you want to take me to prom.” He drawled, narrowing his eyes at the table of guffawing jocks. 

There was uproar. People were laughing, goading, most importantly they were waiting for Jonathan to respond. He looked a little bewildered. It hadn’t been clear to Zach he had even done it out of malice, knocking trays out of the hands of geeky-looking freshman seemed to be a part of his daily routine. He definitely hadn’t been expected to be queer-baited by a geeky-looking freshman in front of a crammed cafeteria. Zach though he could see him sweating a little.

“Y-you’re a fucking faggot.” He responded, his own friends barely congratulating him on the weak comeback.

“And you’re fucking retarded.” Will concluded, punctuating his words by flipping them off and stalked out of the cafeteria, his head held high. The following week he had dyed his hair bleach blonde, like he was challenging them to ignore him. Like he was openly offering them the chance to mock him and didn’t care.

Zach felt the urge to dye his hair, to make a difference, to tell those bigger kids to leave that smaller kid alone because that’s what Will would have done- Will didn’t give a shit about many, many things, some of them probably important, but he strictly hated people who physically belittled others. 

“Like, just call me ‘faggot’ to my face. I’ll call you something worse and point out your insecurities, then we’re square.” Will had commented as they had scrubbed congealed garbage off his bike, unchained and thrown into the dumpsters behind school as an anonymous present.

All that being said, Zach let out a breath of relief when a teacher came round the corner and barked at the bigger kids to knock it off and get into the auditorium.

***  
I sit between Hai and An and despite their totally normal proximity to me on the auditorium stands, I feel incredibly claustrophobic. The first time I ever heard someone read an elegy on behalf of Will Hartman I had barely registered any of the words. I was hot, hungover, stuffed into a suit and eleven seconds away from a full-scale emotional meltdown. It still hurts now, a dull ache in my bones rather than a raw exposed wound. I still feel it, like a phantom limb thrashing around. There is a big picture of Will projected onto the wall, with the epitaph ‘1995-2010’ underneath it. I can practically hear him protesting that they chose his school photograph, his hair a luminescent yellow bird’s nest and glasses crooked across his nose. He looks slightly uncomfortable, half-smiling and side-eyeing something beyond the camera. I have a sneaking sensation that it’s me. We both really fucking hated picture day.

On the one hand I’m glad it’s not a huge, sombre affair. On the other, I wish they had chosen a picture that he liked, I wish the words being projected under the epigraph weren’t obscured by a huge paper machê cow, made by the art department for the Mayville Moos. I wish the whole thing wasn’t so undignified and showy. I especially hate that they chose here of all places to hold the ceremony; the same place they hold cheerleading practice and people hoot and holler over high school basketball games. Will probably came into this room twice in his career at Maryville High, for orientation and the first assembly. After that he clocked that he could spend it hiding out in the men’s room and no one would notice. Never for phys-ed. Will was a master of doctors notes, fake injuries and incredibly convincing wheezing. I could think of one genuine time he had an asthma attack, the inhaler the hospital gave him more a formality than anything else, but it was his favourite excuse to ham up and spend the afternoon in the computer lab instead of doing sport. I wasn’t in his class, but he always found time to come and laugh at me in sweating one out in my school-mandated short shorts.

I tune out the droning of Principal Patterson, then Father Rivington from the church down the road. I know what they are saying, boring palliative drivel that has nothing to do with Will. He would have wanted us to have the day off in his honour, maybe a picnic. I distract myself by looking at the photo, enormous and distorted. You can’t tell what colour his eyes are under his thick-lensed glasses, and I feel strangely privy to the knowledge that they were green, with weird hazel flecks in the left one. I wonder if Will would have grown up to be handsome. Not that I thought he was ugly ever, in fact in retrospect I think I might have had a strange hormone-addled crush on him. I slowly came to terms with this after his death, when it felt safe to admit to myself that the way he laughed was pretty and my stomach felt weird whenever he used to crowd into my space, as if it wasn’t his to invade anyways. Being fourteen is hard, okay? 

I try not to dwell to much on my primary adolescent crush, being that I’m at the memorial service for his death. In my defense it only started in the break between middle and high school, after Will went to camp for like a billion years. Or two months. Or whatever. The orchestra plays something terrible, we stand in silence, we file out, chatter brewing around us from the moment the minute of silence ends. I don’t really resent them for it; most of these kids never knew Will, let alone care that he died. An, Hai and I hang back, waving goodbye to Daerek as he awkwardly sidles out of the school, clearly terrified of being accosted for lurking around a high school. In his defense, he once got ID’d entering a homecoming dance because the hired bouncers didn’t believe he was a senior. I tried not to cast my mind back too much, lest I remember that the summer ball then was the last time I had actually been out to a social event. And the last time I had gotten any.

An tugged at my shirt, disturbing me from my frankly disturbing thoughts. “D’you think we should save him the announcement and go to his office right away?”

Hai shook his head. “Nah, let’s cut class and wait for it, then go.”

I chuckled, impressed at his diabolical thinking. “Holy moly dude, you are so calculating.”

“I have biology first and I am so done with science. I want to be an artist, or play video games for a living.” Hai whined, leaning against the lockers as students filed off into their first classes.

An laughed. “That sounds ridiculous. And impossible-”

“And ridiculously impossible.” I chimed in.

“Shut up you pair of apes, where should we bunk, men’s room?”

“After you m’lady.” I replied, gesturing down the hall.

We ended up crowded inside a single cubicle, a highly dignified senior-year activity.

“You know, I remember this being a lot easier in middle school.” An huffs, sitting on the toilet seat.

Hai nods, shifting to stand opposite me. There does seems to be a lot less space than there used to be, even when there were four or five of us crowding in. “Or even last year, damn An, you’ve been hitting the gym huh?”

“D-An-m!” I crow, poking at his biceps.

“Shut up.” He grinned, nose screwed up. “How long do you think it’ll take?”

I shrugged. “I say we give it ten minimum. I can’t be fucked to do English today, I wanna skip as much as possible.”

Hai’s phone beeped. He tried to pull it out of his pocket, gangly frame meaning that he elbowed An in the head a bit. An shoved him back, out of habit. Hai flailed a little, limited space causing his other elbow to his the toilet stall door. He hissed in pain. “Ow, my funny bone.” He stepped forward, treading on one of my feet. I recoiled under the pressure, which set off the flailing process anew. This time Hai dropped his mobile. The phone skittered along the floor, under the cubicle dividers. I cringed for the entirety of the long silence that followed until an unfamiliar voice cleared its throat.

“Um. It’s a text from Tina?”

Hai cringed. An cringed. I cringed. We all simply cringed for a few seconds, before Hai piped up.“Could you, uh, just slide it back over if you don’t mind?”

“Sure.” Replied the voice, a little hesistantly. True to his word, Hai’s Nokia slid back under the wall. There was another awkward pause.

“Thanks.” Hai said, wincing as he banged his head against the door to stoop and pick it up.

“You’re probably gonna want to wash that before you put it against your face again.” I stage-whispered, trying to fight off giggles at the general debacle I had just watched. We were definitely too grown to be hiding from our education in toilet cubicles but something about it made me feel buoyant inside. _Sometimes shit things can be okay because you experience them with your friends._ It felt strange to be reminded that laughing and dicking around wasn’t something that expired when Will died, it was just something I stopped doing as much. Sometimes I forgot that Will didn’t hold a monopoly over where ‘fun’ and ‘my life’ intersected, these people were important to me too. They still are. I wouldn’t trade them for the world.

I still wanted to giggle, the giddiness not helped by my sudden rush of sentimentality, but I could tell that whoever the stranger was hadn’t left yet. I smothered my laugh with my roll neck and leaned over to see what Hai’s sister had texted him.

“Is it about me?” An asked, wiggling his eyebrows. Hai elbowed him in the head on purpose this time.

“Obviously not. Wow. You know she works in the library in town?”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah not anymore. It burned down early this morning.” Hai said, eyes stretched wide with shock. “They don’t know how yet.”

There was a short outburst from the other cubicle. “Wait what the fuck? That’s crazy.” Then a self-conscious pause. “Sorry. I’m just leaving.”

“Could you crack the door so we can hear the morning announcements?” Hai asked innocently.

“Um. Sure.”

We chorused ‘thank yous’ until it was obvious our mystery toilet guest had departed for class. I started cracking up, wheezing with laughter into my knuckles. An erupted with giggles and Hai’s face shines, tinged with pink. Our laughter is cut short by the tannoy echoing across the tiles.

“... and Hai Lam, An Le and Zachary Scuderi, could you come to the principal’s office please?”

My heart plummeted straight through my stomach, through my intestines, onto the bathroom floor. I can imagine it ghoulishly sliding around across the tiles like Hai’s phone. The smile tugging at my lips falls. We exchange furtive glances, I don’t know how to verbalise the tugging in my chest. I feel like I should steel them for a battle. Instead of saying anything about how much I value both of them as individuals, I trail behind Hai as he leads the way down the hall, mouth clotted with dead, unbreathing words as thick as cinders. 

I sat in the middle of Hai and An for the second time that morning, trying really hard not to make direct eye contact with Principal Patterson. The fact that he actually wasn’t a bad guy made it annoyingly difficult to hate him. He took students’ concerns very seriously, and seemed to actually care about my emotional well-being. It was infuriating. 

“Good morning, boys.” He began, “today is a very challenging day for all of us,” I thought about all the kids crammed into the memorial service who didn’t know Will, had never even met him. How Patterson had only even paid attention to Will when he was punishing him as opposed to getting physically harassed. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes right in front of him. Fucking hypocrite. “And I want you to know that the school is here if you need any additional support. Will was a very bright young man-” _and yet you denied his appeals for a higher computing budget four times_ I thought bitterly, trying to get any word in edgeways I could. His GPA was 2.1. I bet Patterson didn’t know that, only what was written down on fucking generic cue cards.

“...and it was a huge loss for the school and the community when he passed.” I almost snorted with derision. Will hated the school and the community. I kept quiet and Patterson ploughed on with his speech. Next to me An was clenching his fists so hard I could see the veins on his arm emboldening. Hai was sat ramrod straight, looking the picture of poise. It would take years of watching him to know that the way he locked his fingers together on his lap was a clear sign of tension. We were all aggravated by his platitudes. They came off as nothing but cheap.

“It’s very important to me and the rest of senior management that you three get everything you need to get through this time of the year, I know that you were all friends with Will for a long time-” _Since we were seven years old, asshole_ I thought “-and the fact that you are still sticking together is… wonderful.” The complement rang hollow around the stale air of the office. We stared in response and the principal kept rambling on. “I think Will would be very pleased about that, you all coming together to support each other.” That time I actually did roll my eyes. I bitterly hated him. I was so tired of the tokenism. The refusal to engage in the reality of who Will was besides ‘dead student’ made my palms itch. I hated that this was his legacy.

I think Patterson picked up on the change of mood in the room, and switched tact. “Is there anything you need from me specifically? I am willing to mediate deadlines with teachers provided it’s within reason.” He paused. “I also need to ask something from you.” It seemed a crude tactic, the carrot-and-stick method for three grief-stricken teenagers. “Honesty. I know that your emotions are probably very overwhelming right now, but I need you to answer my questions as best you can. Do you know where the North Hill Library is?”

We all frowned in confused. Hai piped up. “My sister works there.”

“Ah, I see. Interesting. Last night was probably a very raw and difficult time for all of you, do you like to blow off steam by… damaging things? Hurting them? Maybe burning them?”

My jaw dropped. Hai shook his head slowly. “You think we burnt down a library?”

“What! We aren’t arsonists!” An sat up suddenly. “How dare you, I love reading-”

Principal Patterson held up his hands beseechingly. “I’m sorry, the sheriff wanted me to get alibis for all of you. It’s the first case of large-scale property damage the town has seen in a while and because of how the dates lined up…”  


“You thought that in memory of our dead friend we would burn down a local institution?” I spoke for the first time, my voice low.

Hai took charge of the situation. “We were all together, the three of us and Daerek Hart, on the hill the far side of the dump. We don’t have evidence really, but that’s the honest truth. I don’t know anything about this library burning down and I’m willing to be Zach and An don’t either.”

Patterson leaned back in his chair. “I believe you, I just had to hear it from you. I will tell Sheriff Turley that he is barking up the wrong tree immediately. Thank you boys, I hope you can all get on with your day as best you can and try and see this as an ordinary Wednesday.”

***

You end up ducking out before second period and returning to the bathroom. You want to scream a little. More than that, you want to cry. Dissolve into little pieces and break away into nothing, soak into the slick linoleum floor. Less than an hour ago this cubicle had been alive, with jokes and laughter and friends. Now the silence threatens to consume you, drag you inside it and render you mute. You wonder if that would be nice, comforting. It is always worse when people try to tell you they understand. Try to relate. Try to shove it down your throat that everything is _normal_ and stable and as it should be, when you know full well that today four years ago something irreplaceable was shattered. And you aren’t ever going to get it back. _Ordinary Wednesday._ Today is so much more than that to you, a stark reminder that either side of one bright May morning, when the sun was shining and ivy-leaved morning glory wove its way through the cemetery gates, your life was never the same again. Never quite as complete, never quite as happy. And now people who live in your town, Sheriffs who interviewed you countless times, reassured you that Will would turn up fine, let you sleep on the sofa of the pokey foyer of the police station waiting for search parties to return, think you are a vandal. Worse than a vandal, a unhinged arsonist.

Your legs are going numb from how you’re curled up on the lid of the toilet and you want to stretch them, by marching all the way home, getting into bed and not moving until dinner. You remembered your iPod this morning, for once. Reasonably you know that the long-term goals- graduate, leave town, learn to breathe properly again- don’t get easier if you skip classes and don’t bother to spend any time on your projects that are due for ever burgeoning deadlines. The only counter argument you have to hand is that you don’t care. You couldn’t focus on anything academic today if your life depended on it. You feel ill and overwhelmed and the sheer white of the bathroom is making your head spin a little. So you leave, head full of things that clatter and crash against each other as you move. 

Will Hartman, smirking. Trying to remember the last time you laughed until you cried. Jenabella’s eyeliner, smudged across her cheek. Will Hartman, red-faced with fury after a sophomore named Tyler locked him in a port-a-loo for two hours. An and Hai, distracted in class somewhere. The sound of a cuckoo singing in the distance, full-throated and ignorant, as a coffin is lowered into the ground, empty. Five boys on a hill, looking into the future with blind optimism. The house at the end of your road that stands silent and empty, like a hollow wraith that will not be resurrected, refuses to be made whole again. Being fourteen and getting half-hard because Will wouldn’t stop making mock-orgasm sounds through your headset. The phrase: “We’ll always have each other, right?”

You walk home without taking in any of the May-morning views. Your iPod is on the loudest setting and your eyes are honed upon your sneakers, as they miss every crack in the sidewalk between the high school and your home. You don’t cut across the fields. There is something poignantly offensive about how beautiful May 13th always seems to be; even ignoring all of it you can smell grass being mown and feel the glimmer of sunlight upon your brow. The world renewing itself should give you hope, but instead it feels like nature is betraying you. Betraying Will. Proving once and for always that the Mother Nature doesn’t give a shit about people and their tragedies, she is forever and every life is fleeting. _Some more fleeting than others,_ you think, unconsciously twisting the knife like always.

You expected your house to be empty, but it wasn’t.

***

I haven’t seen her since she moved out of town, fleeing from the ghost of her son and the ruins of her marriage. That had been almost four years ago, the moving vans cluttering our street around us as she clasped my hands in hers and wished me well. Then it became my street alone, to share with Will’s ghost. She is standing in my kitchen, clear as day, real as my own mother standing next to her. I remember her wearing the same baby-pink cardigan when Will and I were kids. I don’t recognise the grey hairs, crowding around her temple. It is surreal, it is past and present combined into a small-framed woman, death and life and time and space all conspiring together. Her eyes are the exact same shade of green as Will’s used to be.

“Hi, Mrs Hartman.” I croak, trying to compose myself. She opens her arms and without thinking I walk into them, hugging her in earnest. She laughs, unshed tears choking her a little.

“Oh my word, Zach. Look how grown-up you are.” Everything she says holds a strange nugget of negative capability for me, that little punch in the gut. _Look how grown-up you are, imagine how grown up my son would be if he weren’t dead._ I know it’s a fucked up way of thinking but it’s there whether I like it or not, whispering in my ear.

“I thought you were living in Colorado?” I said, for lack of a better thing to say as our embrace ended.

She smiles. “I am, I just came to sign off on the house being sold, drop some last assets off to the sheriff’s office and visit Will.”

It dawns on me that Karen Hartman is performing an exorcism today.

“I see. That’s… Good.” I reply, my throat contorting around words that I don’t really mean, too constricted to say what I really want to. Will’s mom was always beloved to me, but now I sense a kindred spirit in her. She too is trying to move on, to climb out of the vacuum that was torn in time and space when Will died. It feels humbling, to appreciate that she has had it harder than me. That when I lost a best friend, she lost her flesh and blood. Her only son. Right in the middle of filing for divorce, losing all the anchors in her life at once. I want to hug her again but I think it’d be weird. I decide I don’t care and I hug her again.

She sniffs into my shoulder. I am terrified to be the same height as her. “I miss him too darling, so much.”

I make a strange half-choked sound as we separate. My mom can tell I’m floundering and steps in. “Karen, you’re more than welcome to stay here for the night. Colorado is such a long drive, and you must be exhausted.”

She sighed. “Thank you darling, but I really don’t think I can. I have a room booked in Ellinwood, five minutes down the freeway. I just wanted to get all of these errands out of the way.”

“It’s hard, remembering him everywhere.” I say quietly. I don’t think it’s the right thing to bring up really, but I have to let her know somehow; she is not alone, I see him everywhere, feel his presence in Maryville.

She smiles, resigned and sad. “Maryville is a ghost town to me. I have nothing left here any more but painful memories.” We exchange a glance, and I wish my mom wasn’t here for a moment. I don’t want her to feel like she has to help, because there is no cure to the wasting disease that Maryville inflicts upon those who still see Will in every thread of it’s tapestry, behind every corner. I feel like Karen knows, though. That I still see Maryville through the same blurred lens that she does, the same grotesque Groundhog Day that isn’t one day on repeat, but rather every day with the same absence lurking. The same long shadow, cast by someone who doesn’t get to see the sun any more. I can’t stop thinking about the word ‘same’.

“Zach, would you like a coffee?” My mother asks, cutting my convoluted thought process short. Yet another terrifying aspect of being 18 and essentially an adult; being treated like one. Usually I would retreat upstairs to let them talk about... Mom-related stuff. I don’t know. But it felt like a big step, sitting down with them. Being talked to like a grown-up by Will’s mom. It feels like the antithesis of Principal Patterson’s office. _Not_ being patronised by someone who _does_ understand. Conversation flowed easily, and I realised that my mom had also lost a very dear friend when the Hartmans had left Maryville, in all their various methods. Karen was working as a school nurse in Colorado, she hadn’t heard from her ex-husband Robert since the divorce, she was moving in with a new boyfriend.

“I couldn’t bear to throw his old stuff away, so I thought I might as well bring it back here.” She explained. “And keeping the house has been a really sinkhole for money but… I don’t know, a mother holds out hope.”

My mom nodded sagely. “There’s no body.”  


“I don’t think he’s alive out there, not really, but I’ll never give up completely.” Karen said, her voice thick with emotion but her eyes clear. She was resigned to the reality she found herself in.  


I swallowed the dregs of my lukewarm coffee to disguise the tears building in my throat. My mom nodded. “It must be the worst part, not knowing for sure.” She said.

“It is and it isn’t. In a way it’s nice to know he could just turn up someday.”

I snorted, the effect slightly ruined by the wetness of my eyes. “If Will just turned up someday I would hug him, then I would beat the crap out of him.”

Karen laughed. “I would whoop that little turd with my slipper just like I did when he was eight. Then I’d cry probably. Cry and hug him. Probably refuse to let him out of my sight ever again.”

I giggled at the mental image of a nineteen-year-old Will Hartman being threatened by his tiny mother with a slipper. Karen finished her coffee and checked her watch. “Oh Lord, I have to meet my solicitor in twenty minutes.”

“Zach, could you grab Karen her coat and show her out please?” I bade my mom’s orders and went out to grab her jacket from the hall, a familiar suede one. This one I remember from being a little older, her coming home to find Will and I doing our homework at this kitchen table and slinging the very same jacket over the counter and asking us how our day had been. I decided that engaging with someone’s life in weird pit stops made my head hurt. Too many timelines and lifetimes crossing over at once, memories that intersected at awkward angles. I sloped back into my own kitchen, my own life, my own present to find my Karen and my mom hugging.

“If you need anything, please just call okay?” My mom was saying quietly, rubbing her friend’s back.

Karen nodded, a little misty-eyed. “Thank you darling, please come visit whenever you like. Colorado isn’t the most thrilling place for a getaway, but I’ve missed you terribly. That goes for you too, Zach. My door is always open to Scuderis.” She said, fondly. I smiled, my heart aching. 

She followed me out onto the doorstep. “Would you like to come with me?” For a split-second I thought she meant to Colorado and I was totally confused. She finished, “to visit Will?”

I wish she’d just call it “Will’s grave”. For one thing, he isn’t even really down there. It isn’t his final resting place, it’s somewhere we have created to commiserate our feelings, to make us feel like it’s over. So _we_ can rest with good conscience. It reminds me of something my English teacher said; “we don’t write poems for the dead, we write them for the living, to comfort them. The dead don’t need comforting.”

 _The dead don’t need comforting_ rang in my head.

“I think I’m going to go later, maybe tomorrow. With Hai and An and Daerek.”

“I’m so glad you’re all still friends. I know Will would be too. You have grown up into a wonderful young man, Zachary. I hope I’ll see you again someday.”

"Just not here.”

“Just not here.” She agreed, “I don’t think I’ll ever come back to Maryville again.”

“Same.” I said, thoughtlessly.

She smiled and the lines around her eyes creased. She clasped my hands in hers, just as she did the first time she left town. Wordless, protective, kind. It felt like a circle closing. A long, tortured loop drawing back in on itself. I said a silent prayer to no one in particular that Karen Hartman would find her peace someday, only because I felt that was what she was doing for me. She walked down the drive without looking back, and I didn’t blame her. Looking out her blotted against the neighbourhood, all I could imagine was Will aged seven, Will aged eight, Will aged nine, being escorted by her down to my house so she could gossip with my mom and the two of us could get up to whatever childish mischief occurred to us that day.

 

***

No mischief was occurring to him right now though, in fact Zach felt the familiar craving for something to swallow up his attention span. His mom went to work for the afternoon, leaving him to load up the first game that came up when his laptop flickered to life. The login screen for League of Legends sprang up, eager to devour the next four hours of his lifespan. The client booted up slowly, and he absent-mindedly scrolled down his friends list. Most kids were still at school this time of day, and only a two green active profiles blinked back at him. Long Dong and Short Dog. Zach’s heart stuck in his throat. Both of those accounts belonged to Will Hartman. They hadn’t been active in four years. 

[12:40] ???

Both accounts went offline as soon as the message registered. He felt dizzy, with a bizarre blur of anger and righteousness and sadness. That meant someone was fucking around with Will’s stuff. On the anniversary of his funeral. Zach’s stomach felt like someone had grabbed it and squeezed. He kept being dragged back and forth, through seas of acceptance and sand dunes that scraped his skin and made him feel raw. Sometimes Will was a beloved memory, and sometimes felt him breathing down his neck. His mind could not categorise all of the thoughts and feelings that rattled around inside him. There was no clear narrative, the sleek line of denial-anger-bargaining-depression-acceptance was a lie. Logically, he accepted that Will was dead. He should have been at the final stage that the school counselor explained to him. But he was pulled in all different ways, his heart responding to stimulus that his head couldn’t comprehend. Zach was still angry, in fact he had been so angry for so long that the flames in his belly had concentrated into one white-hot coal that lodged in his ribcage. He felt it flare and fume now, at the faceless, voiceless person who was messing with Will’s things when he wasn’t here to tell them to knock it off.

Zach considered that it could have been an error. _How could both of the accounts be online at once?_ He wondered. He checked the match history for both accounts; nothing since April 2010. They were both dormant as far as he could tell. He also patiently pitched the idea to his brain that he had officially lost his shit and imagined the whole thing. As emotionally stressful days went, this one was right up there.

He played four games and lost all of them, which didn’t help his mood in the slightest. Zach grunted in annoyance and exited the post-game lobby, the way that Will used to sing-song the word _tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiilted!_ reverberating around his head. Short Dog and Long Dong were back. He followed the active position in the sidebar to the profile for Short Dog, a handle he had crafted after his mother's outrage that his public gaming account made any claims about his 'dong'. A new match was in the history, but every field of information was blank; no champion, no KDA, no date, no nothing. It was obviously a glitch. The whole thing had been one massive error. Zach let a sigh wrack around his ribcage, trying to exhale the anger that lingered there. He didn’t really know why the idea of someone using Will’s League of Legends account bothered him so much. He supposed it was partially the timing, partially that online gaming had been part of the glue that held their teenage relationship together. At least four nights a week Zach would log onto a voice client and play anything that Will wanted to. Then there was staying over, setting up his laptop on Will’s desk so they could queue together.

Zach tried to remember the last time he had ever stayed over at Will’s house. It had been like every other time, the only difference that it never happened again. The exact memories were shrouded in familiarity. They probably ate pizza rolls. Will probably flamed some stranger so hard that Zach snorted juice out of his nose. The same things they had been doing for half their lives by that point.

He remembered the week before that, Will had come over. They had started hanging out at his house less and less after he explained that his parents were splitting up. They were halfway through a game of Team Fortress 2, eating squeezy yoghurt tubes that his mom had bought. Will was totally thrashing him, but he wasn’t out of the game yet. He managed to gun him down from a vantage point and Will yelped in shock.

“Oh shit. I jizzed.”

He turned around to see Will laughing, the yoghurt all over his hands and chin.

“Oh my god you’re actually an idiot.” Zach wheezed in response.

Will kept giggling for a few moments before resetting back to his ‘serious face’. He was obviously about to say something dumb. “SneakyCastro, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to lick yoghurt off me. Can I hear... a hundred dollars?”

“You would have to pay me two hundred to do that.”

“Damn, expensive whore.” Will had goaded, absent-mindedly licking yoghurt off his hands.

Zach had quickly shifted his attention away from that, getting back to the game. His pants had felt slightly tight from watching Will run his tongue along his fingers like that, putting them in his mouth and popping his lips as he sucked on his fingertips. Back then he had thought he was being dirty in his mind, but now he wondered if Will had known what he was doing, just a little bit. He even more seriously considered that he really needed to stop letting these memories pop up in his head, they were distracting and embarrassing and made him feel stupid for getting angry at someone for _maybe_ accessing a long-dead profile of Will’s on a MOBA game. He was desecrating Will’s memorial day in a much worse way, feeling hot and cold and guilty, like his skin was stretched over his bones a little too tight.

Zach thought about queuing for another game, snowballing his LP losses at the benefit of not having to pay attention to his brain. Video games were mechanical, calculated, easy material mental work. User J3nab3lla popped up as active. He made the tactical decision to disconnect. It was nothing personal, except it was deeply personal and Jenabella made him feel embarrassed and small and a little ashamed. 

Zach had arrived at Homecoming last year with the expectation of leaving at 9pm after saying hi to a few friends. Plans had changed after the punch had been spiked so much the ratio of alcohol to juice was illegal in some states, Hai showed up from a family party drunk as hell and his suit jacket lined with contraband booze and Zach had been ushered out to smoke a joint on the fire escape with Daerek and a bunch of his senior friends. It turned out to be kind of a shindig after all. Instead he left at midnight, cross-fading like shit, holding hands with Jena. They hooked up in her car. He had been too trashed to finish. She dropped him home and never spoke to him again. It was awkward. Before the dance they had a weird, coy flirting thing going on that had never really manifested in the real world. First lab together as sophomores, Zach hadn’t expected them to have anything in common besides wanting to scrape a passing grade in biology. Instead he found they made each other laugh a lot, and she played the same games as him. They bonded over that. There was definitely a patch in Zach’s life where he would skip homework to play League with Jena. She was fun and approachable and definitely pretty. 

The week after she had avoided looking at him at every opportunity and Zach felt that made it clear that nothing ever would happen in the real world. It also made him feel like shit, but whatever. Virginity-schmerginity. Zach had felt his hormones waning since then, he still jacked off pretty often but the thought of actually going out and having sex with someone didn’t make him feel like there were fireworks going off on his skin. Instead he smelt cheap car air freshener and the burn of rum down the back of his throat. Whatever. Another thing on the list; graduate, get out of Kansas, learn to breathe, get laid. 

Zach rubbed his eyes and yawned. He felt like exhausted on every level more or less; not that he expected anything else from today. He pulled his iPod out of the draw on his bedside table, determined to find a good album to nap to. His habit of listening to whole records instead of downloading individual songs had definitely come from borrowing CDs from Will. His dad has an enormous collection that Will had been constantly been burning songs and mixtapes from and lending to Zach excitedly. His taste in music had been enormous and ecelectic as a result, a weird mismash of Springsteen LPs and CDs Will bought in town using his pocket money. They were all still crammed onto Zach’s 64GB iPod, undisturbed. He scrolled down the list until it selected some British artist, called Florence and the Machine.

Zach had laughed the first time Will played it for him, cross-legged on his bed. “It’s kind of… Flowery. I think it’s dumb.” He had said, leafing through a magazine. He had expected more of a fight, but Will had just shrugged.

“It’s happy. And good. I don’t care if you don’t like it because I do, and you like tonnes of terrible things.” Zach had flipped him off, Will had thrown a sock at him. The world turned as it should.

Years too late, Zach had to admit he was right; it was happy. And good. It lifted him away from awkward conversations and women whose eyes aged forty years in four and the smouldering ruins of libraries. In his mind’s eye he could almost believe he was in a similar town that wasn’t Maryville, inside he was a normal teenager, and the kite resting on his desk was only a sentimental memento because he was growing up, not because he was losing things, sometimes it felt like rapidly, like strips of bark falling away from a rotten tree.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trying out a new format for dialogue! Lemme know what you think ^^

It had started raining that evening, the cascade of water gushing out of the gutter above my window lulled me to sleep. The next day it hadn’t stopped, the sky bloated and tinged with grey as it halfheartedly leaked, like the final meagre spools of blood dribbling from a wound. I spent the morning dabbling around the dull end of autopilot; wake up, take shower, get dressed, eat cereal, walk to school. I felt strangely cleansed, numb, like I was the other side of some kind of veil. I had slept an unprecedented almost twelve hours last night; for the first time in a few days, I felt kind of fresh, well-rested, my lungs felt less constricted. Now was rest, and respite. Now was the time I would start to build back up the walls around my memories, focus on the present, plug up the leaks in my brain that dragged me into thinking non-stop about bleach-blonde hair and snickering laughs and how obvious it can become that there’s a gap in your life when you are forced to think about it. I felt purged, cathartic. I just wanted a long, probably very boring, simple day of school. Something mundane and real, not dogged by spectres, no more emotional vortexes, no crying. All I wanted was an easy day to start me off, but I also knew my own track record and kept my expectations low, for all I knew the library was only the first target of a serial arsonist at large in Maryville. My ass could be getting lit up any day now. I considered the real-life consequences of burning down a school and decided it was best not to attempt taking matters into my own hands. I’m not the most athletic dude to have graced this earth and I think ‘fleeing a scene’ is out of my repertoire. Plus one in four humans in this town, with no digression of gender, age, or common sense, is packing a gun nowadays trying to prove some garbage political point about 'freedom'. I earnestly defend my freedom to dislike guns, in theory and in practice. The idea of a literal contraption that _shoots out death_ makes me nauseatingly nervous.

I could remember feeling that way young enough that Will shooting a BB gun at me had made me cry when we were tiny kids. It turned out it had no pellets inside it and I was in no danger, but nevertheless Will had very solemnly told me he would never do it again and we shook on it, spitting into our palms to seal the deal. Afterwards we both realised it was kind of gross and shook on never doing that again either. It’s one of my only distinct memories of him at that age, but it makes me pause every time I think about it and I have to chase it out of my mind, deliberately stepping on cracks in the pavement all the way to school. I don’t really know what kind of point I’m trying to prove. I’m _really not trying to prove a point,_ but for some reason I put on all black this morning. Black t-shirts and black jeans were working for me at the moment. My thin jacket was navy, but it still put me in the mood to blast heavy guitar music through my iPod for the entire walk to school. I felt a bit like a teenage cliche, sure, but at least I looked in the mirror and liked what I saw that morning, just a little bit. There’s something therapeutic about putting an armour on. Like the goths outside school, like a Varsity jacket, like bleached-blonde hair, like letting your sister pierce your ear. Growing up feels a bit like finding all the pieces of armour, all the metaphorical shields and chain-mail pieces you need to partake in being an emotionally responsible adult, maybe even being happy at the end of your quest. I felt a million miles behind everyone else, but it also kind of felt like a start. Then I start mixing metaphors a bit too heavily for this early in the morning, and end up wondering if the other guys still have Dungeons  & Dragons evenings in Daerek’s attic.

I went straight to homeroom once I got into school, not bothering to take my music out. I wouldn’t say I had any friends in that room exactly. Not out of any mean-spiritedness, I just never cultivated any meaningful conversations with any of them. I kept myself to myself in the corner. I texted Hai about playing D&D for something to do. I had a final math question to answer in my book so I got on with that, not looking forward to the two-hour mandatory chemistry lab session that would swallow up my morning; then recess briefly, then maths, then lunch, then computing for the afternoon. A straightforward, regular day. I figured I could hack it. Hai texted me back as I sauntered into lab. My lab partner was a nice, fairly chill guy called Andy Ta. He seemed to genuinely find me kind of funny and never minded letting me borrow his homework. Andy was definitely in the “acquaintance” category, we never really interacted outside of science class beyond waves in the halls but he was a low-key chemistry whizz and I was thrilled to be partnered with someone so capable of carrying my sorry ass through a core science module. From what I could tell, he was just taking it for extra credit. 

“Good morning, sir.” He said pleasantly as I sat on the lab bench and starting pulling out my poorly-maintained notes. I would definitely be dead in the water for this subject if not for Andy.

“Top of the morning to you too.” I said, pulling a goofy smile and checking my phone. 

**[Received 9:55]** Hai: fuck no idiot  
**[Received 9:56]** Hai: i wuld be so down for a d &d nite tho now i think about it

I smiled a little more. In the back of my mind I knew it wouldn’t be the same as when we were twelve, Will was easily the best dungeon master out of all of us- the loudest, most dramatic, most inventive kid. We once spent an entire weekend on one campaign that he had spent the best part of the month working on, although none of our characters made it to the end. I could remember Hai’s furrowed brow. “Will, no fair! This doesn’t even seem possible!” He had snapped, the last one of us to die on the quest for Muldoon’s treasure. Even with the permanent rose-tinted glow that emanated from Will in my mind and memories, there was no way I could erase how him and Hai used to bicker. Big personalities, dominant characters I guess, tend to develop friction. “It’s perfectly possible! You said you wanted a challenge, well here it is.” Will had retorted smugly, quietly proud that his dastardly machinations had outwitted all four of us.

 **[Received 9:57]** Hai: fuck skl and bein an adult dude, lets do it this wkend

My phone’s beeping interrupted my thoughts. Wow, _weekend plans._ I strained my memory to think of the last time I had done anything on the weekend that wasn’t play games, watch TV and half-heartedly wank. It made me uncomfortable, how remembering Will and being younger came so naturally- in fact most of the time I couldn’t stop it. My mind was constantly looping from present to past, only shoving burgeoning stresses away and opening my notebook to concentrate on the now would help. It was the difference between a waterfall and a pumped pipeline, remembering before and after Will’s death. The memories post-funeral seem saturated and drained of colour. I don’t remember how I felt, only strange snatches of vignettes. It didn’t flow like before, the narrative of my life shattered. I replied to Hai’s text and let the ringing of the school bell chase away my disobedient thoughts.

 **[Sent 9:59]** Hai: hell yeah  
**[Sent 10:00]** Hai: see u at lunch?

It smacked of a slightly desperate afterthought to me, but for once I didn’t feel like slinking off on my own somewhere to eat. I was becoming dependent on my friends again. _Maybe you’re starting to trust them not to vanish again?_ My inner-voice needled at me. I fought the urge to roll my eyes. Everyone’s a psychoanalyst, including my subconscious apparently. I felt my phone buzz as I tucked it into my pocket, resolving to check it after the lab. I needed to get at least an A in this, so I could coast my actual midterm exam. Our teacher droned on about the practical virtues of chromatography for a few minutes, which I resolutely tuned out, then we started work. Generally I just let Andy order me around. I wasn’t too proud to admit I didn’t really know what was going on. 

He set up some complicated-looking apparatus and a beaker of water as I cut out strips of paper like a kindergartner. He handed me a handful of felt tip pens and a ruler. At least I had graduated to elementary school antics! “Just a dot like that, above the line, okay?” Andy reassured me as he added chemicals to the beaker and did all of the actual work.

I mock-saluted. “Aye aye captain!” 

After the experiment was fully set up there was nothing to do but wait and watch how the ink of the felt-tips reacted to the chemicals. I stretched and tried to think of a good conversation topic, bored of the silence that had settled. “So… How are things in the badminton team? Tense?”

Andy sighed, looking like a man who had walked a thousand miles, rather than a teenager. He turned to me with dead eyes. “I know it’s hard to believe, but yeah.” I tried not to let my face crease up into a laugh. Of course Andy “God-Blessed” Ta was heavily invested in the power dynamics of the school badminton team. He tutted, but with a slight smile. I could tell he wasn’t actually mad. “Laugh it up, we have serious internal issues at the moment.”

I made my eyes go wide in mock-horror. “Oh shit like… Diarrhoea?”

We both cracked up, gaining a few looks from the lab-partners either side of us.

“Not that kind of internal issue dumbass!” He leant forward, conspiratorially. “We have significant issues with the volleyball team at the moment and a lot of factions are forming around how we’re going to deal with it." I failed to not laugh at that, imagining both teams beefing each other in their sports kits, which included a butter-yellow aertex and often embarrassingly short-shorts. I tried to keep my giggles to a minimum, for the sake of Andy’s dignity.

“That sounds very intense. What’s Hai done now?” I asked diplomatically.

It usually wasn’t enough for Hai to succeed, his rivals also had to fail miserably. I could remember in middle school when someone else had run for the essentially empty role of class president, being the president of a bunch of ten-year-olds wasn’t something that stoked many people’s power-hungry egos, but Hai wasn’t most people. The other kid didn’t get class president, and also he didn’t come back to school the next year, for reasons that were never made totally clear to any of us. Hai was never punished so it could have just been a coincidence, but regardless I felt a small amount of fear on Andy’s behalf.

“They keep using our practice space! When we’ve booked it! I’m sure I write my name on the sign-up sheet for Monday and Tuesday afternoons, but when we get there they’re all there… Volleying about! And Hai Lam pulls out the sign-up sheet and bam! His name where mine was!”

I tried not to roll my eyes too hard, lest they fall out of my skull and ruin our chromatography experiment. It sounded like classic Hai to me; he had a habit of dividing and conquering things that didn’t suit him.

“I think there’s gonna be a power-grab by someone else to become president. I’m not incapable, I just don’t know how he’s doing it!” Andy was just short of wringing his hands by this point. I actually felt sorry for the dude and patted his shoulder awkwardly.

“Tell you what, Hai and I have been friends for a really long time. I’m even getting lunch with him today, I’ll talk to him about it. Maybe he’ll ease off if he realises it’s causing real problems.” I said gently. I considered myself one of the few people who could, to some extent, control Hai when he got all manipulative and wrathful. Daerek was definitely the best at shouting sense into him. An had an uncanny ability to side-eye you until you start thinking about your choices. All three of us had our own way of keeping Hai in line when I thought about it.

“Really? You’d do that for me?” Andy said, his eyes shining.

I smiled, actually happy to help him. “Yeah of course dude, no worries. Who do you think’s gonna try to usurp you?”

“D’you know Juan Garcia? He’s so up in my shit at the moment, he’s only a sophomore but totally talented-”

I let Andy ramble on for the rest of the session, enjoying the drama. I had missed teenage things, like getting hot under the collar about sports teams or doing lab reports with a friend. The schism between Andy and I was unobservable to anyone else, but he was concerned with the living, the present, the future- and my head was crammed with the past. I was trying, though. Trying to move on, trying to engage better with the world around me. The normalcy of chemistry lab was definitely something to cherish right now.

***

Zach had honestly never imagined he would think the words ‘chemistry lab’ and ‘cherish’ in the same sentence, but his chest cavity felt buoyant for once as he headed towards his locker to drop off his work from that morning, it would require a little refining but to him it looked like a slice of A-grade science. Math had been averagely boring, not so challenging that his brain ached, but also nothing interesting had happened. He sauntered down the hall checking the phone that had laid dormant in his bag more or less since homeroom.

 **[Received 10:02]** Hai: yeah of course dude, c u by my locker?

Zach hung a left and wended his way through the rapidly clogging halls, Hai having both the benefit and misfortune of having a locker on the way to the Cafeteria. It meant he could get good dibs on desserts if he wanted, but also had to deal with some of the school’s most infamous stampedes during peak lunch hours. Hai was pulling his wrist brace out of his locker, the door panel inside adorned with countless varsity stickers, a bunch of polaroids and a few handwritten notes. Zach’s gut twisted to remember that after he cleaned out his locker last summer, he hadn’t bothered sticking anything up again. It hadn’t seemed important.

“Hey dude!” Hai called over, trying to avoid being jostled by swarms of upperclassmen as he strapped up his arm.

Zach smiled. “Hey man, wrist giving you trouble again?”

“Eh, nothing I can’t handle.” Hai shrugged, slamming his locker shut.

“Nothing laying off the hentai wouldn’t fix.”

Hai snickered. “Shut the fuck up man, as if I’m into all that tentacle bullshit.”

Zach raised his eyebrows. “Wow dude, that tentacle bullshit is a noble industry, and many fine artist’s life work. What’s your livelihood Hai?”

“Kicking the crap out of you if you don’t shut up?”

“Fight me IRL?”

“Hah, fight me... IRS.”

“Huh?”

“Fight me in Runescape, you massive dweeb.”

As Zach opened his mouth to give Hai a dose of the greatest clap-back of the century, _because what kind of amateur calls someone else a dweeb and invokes the name of Runescape in the same sentence?_ An cut across him, joining the conversation as he sauntered over like he had been there the entire time. “No. No fucking way am I getting into Runescape again, not this close to my finals. That game is a sink-hole for time."

“Damn, then you’ll miss me and Hai in and epic head-to-head deathmatch.” Zach lamented, rolling his eyes.

“Is that even how Runescape works?” Hai wondered out loud.

“Who cares! We are wasting precious time for lunch!” An declared jubilantly, leading the way to the cafeteria.

It took the entirety of the queue, being ladled what could charitably called a meal by the lunch ladies, having a full-scale dilemma about what drink to get, eventually buying a carton of orange juice, and sitting down for Zach to remember his earlier conversation with Andy.

Waving his fork in Hai’s direction across the table, he happily talked around a mouthful of food. “oh yeah, Hai- stop harassing the badminton team! Poor Andy Ta is gonna have a full-scale breakdown because of you.”

Hai, true to his small-time villain aesthetic, literally cackled. “You would think he’d start checking the sheet on Fridays, all I’ve been doing is re-photocopying it with my name stuck over his.”

An shook his head in disbelief. “Yeah, but _why?”_

“To ensure that volleyball is the school’s highest priority in terms of dorky sports.” Hai replied, like that was the most reasonable response ever.

Zach gaped a little at the sheer pettiness Hai could stoop to. He was almost impressed. “Do you do this to all your rival teams?”

“Some of them. Most of them." Hai squirmed defensively. "It’s not like I’m sabotaging my own competition!”

“Yeah, but that somehow makes it weirder.” An laughed.

Hai raised his hands in surrender. “Okay okay, I’ll stop usurping the badminton team’s time in the auditorium. He does have that up-and-coming Sophomore to worry about.”

Zach stared at him. “Literally how do you know that? Do you have informants? Is this conversation being recorded?”

“No! I’m only doing two AP classes this semester and that’s all. I’m… Bored." Hai fiddled with his earring self-consciously. "At least plotting social machinations gives me something to do.”

“Then it’s settled! We’re having a Dungeons and Dragons night." Zach declared, guilt turning like a hot rock in his stomach. He felt like he should have known Hai was struggling, instead of being absent and self-obsessed. "I feel like you should be the dungeon master. Your brain has clearly only got more devious over the years.”

Hai shrugged, looking immodestly pleased that Zach had said that. “I would say _devious-_

An burst out laughing. “I would! We’ve gotta get you channelling your powers for good again. Is your earring the source of your witchcraft?” He reached out to try and touch it and Hai swatted his hand away.

“I’ll hex you.” Hai said in a low voice, trying not to giggle. "The both of you."

“Yeah I’m totally shitting my pants over you maybe transfiguring me into one of your weeaboo minions.” Zach chuckled. His chilli con carne tasted more like soil than chilli, but it went down easy with orange juice and making fun of his friends.

***

Despite the fact that he didn’t find the subject itself that interesting, the computer lab was definitely Zach’s favourite place in school. It was a little warmer than room-temperature, the air always alive with the hum of hard-drives and a faint odour of mustiness that Zach found strangely soothing. It was also decked out with comfy office chairs that could spin around, having somewhere nice to plant your ass never fails to make a place more appealing. There was something about simply walking through the door that made Zach feel a little more centred, at peace with himself. There was someone clattering around in one of the cupboards, but Zach took no notice and turned on his computer, pulling a sheaf of notes out of his bag as the old machine gradually warmed up. As he logged onto his personal account, he heard a thump, a thud and a groan. The cupboard opened behind him.

“Oh, hey man!”

He span around on his chair, to smile at Nicolaj Jensen. Nicolaj was Danish, weird, and really really funny, in no particular order. He was constantly lurking in the school computer labs from what Zach could tell, always working on something insanely complicated-sounding that he would resolutely try to explain to him every single time. He was definitely some form of genius, even if he couldn’t tell that Zach was only ever following a maximum of 25% of the things that came out of his mouth. 

“‘Sup dude?” Zach responded. “What exactly were you wrangling in that closet?”

“My sexuality.” Jensen deadpanned. “No but really, I couldn’t reach the top shelf and I wanted these HDMI cables.” He brandished the box, grinning.

“So you…?”

“Threw other things at the box until it fell down.” He smiled, proud of his problem-solving prowess.

Zach guffawed. “Really? You can hack into a Google server but you can’t figure out how to get things down from the top shelf without causing property damage?”

“Hey, hey! I can _allegedly_ hack into a Google server. You have no evidence of anything. And neither does the government. Hopefully.”

Zach rolled his eyes. He liked Jensen a lot. The first time they met, he thought he was kind of shy. He didn’t talk to anyone in their class, even when they were instructed to work in groups. He just kept himself to himself in the corner, tapping furiously on his keyboard. It only took hanging out with him once without eleven other kids present to realise he was a loud, brash, mile-a-minute hurricane of a human. Zach always felt a tinge of regret that they only hung out in computing sessions. Jensen was genuine, funny and cool, if you squinted past all of the semi-strangeness. At the very least, he was never bored around him. 

“Also if you inspect that cupboard I think you’ll find no visible differences from how I found it.” Jensen said pompously, sitting down at the computer he was using behind Zach and pulling out a clump of cables with a flourish. Unfortunately they were all tangled together into a dense knot. His shoulders fell. Zach snicked and ran his program, just like he did every time he sat down to work on it. It helped his brain to move alongside the process, spying out where it snagged. Instead of running the database numbers, the screen went dark. Zach blinked in disbelief. He checked the monitor hadn’t switched off, but the green light blinked back at him belligerently. Zach blinked again. He changed tact, opting to tap the enter key furiously until something happened. It remained black, and Zach was ready to give up and try another computer before things began happening in earnest. Strands of colour flickered across the monitor, cyan and white lattices crackled and dissipated. Then the strobing effects started to get more intense, the screen convoluted with flashing and twisting beams of yellow and magenta. Zach was about to disconnect the monitor and write it off as a weird problem with the hardware of the screen, when a popping sound began to emanate from the hard drive, gaining Jensen’s attention.

“What the fuck is happening over here?”

He poked his head over Zach’s shoulder, curiosity nullifying any respect for personal space he once had. “I have zero fucking clue. I have never seen anything like this in my life.” Zach replied sincerely. “I assume a faulty monitor.” Jensen hummed as he reached over and jiggled the mouse. The screen began to light up like crazy, a fever pitch of flashing and alternating colours. Parts of the screen were overwhelmed with white. There was a snap of electricity. Jensen yelped and started backwards, clutching his hand. Zach took the initiative, ducked under the desk and yanked out the plug out of the mains before staggering backwards.

“Holy _shit_.” He gasped, adrenaline pumping around his veins. The computer fizzed angrily for another few seconds before cutting out entirely. They both waited with bated breath until it was clear the beast was dormant again.

“Dude.” Jensen held out his hand, “look at this.” The palm of his hand was burned, electricity raising the skin up raw and tender.

Zach gasped. “Oh my god. Are you okay? That looks painful as shit.”

“It stings a lot. I’m more concerned with how the fuck that happened though. Computers don’t randomly electrocute people through a USB port. I’m gonna turn it back on.” Jensen moved towards the computer in question but Zach blocked his path with his slightly broader frame.

“No way, Jesus Christ dude! Go to the nurse, Nancy Drew. The mystery can wait.”

“It is swelling a little.” He said, poking at his hand gingerly. The skin was blistered and puckering rapidly.

Zach's stomach rolled a little just looking at it. “Swelling a little? It looks like you have a golf ball under your skin. Get to the fucking nurse, I’ll wait here and… Supervise the monster-machine.”

“Okay, don’t get any of the technicians yet! I want to see if it does that again. It was unreal.” Jensen said emphatically, before tearing out the door.

“Never seen anything like it.” Zach agreed quietly, as Jensen tore out of the room.

Zach sat back down, sucking in a deep breath. His heart was hammering in his chest. That was easily one of the strangest things that had ever happened to him. He pressed the spacebar gently, not wanting to set off another raging reaction from the computer. Everything seemed okay, no glaring malfunctions. He plugged the computer back in and flipped it on. The hum of the hard drive sounded regular. Zach logged into his school account again. The monitor resolution seemed unchanged despite the fucking lightshow it had just put on. He bit his lip anxiously, so far, so normal. _Perhaps too normal?_ He thought, before shaking the idea off. This was some bizarre problem, not someone trying to mess with him. Zach retraced his steps from before the incident and loaded up the programme he had been writing. As it booted up he felt another tinge of anxiety; it was his project for the entire year, and counted for almost 80% of his grade for the semester. To his memory he had encoded zero things likely to cause a computer to go bezerk and electrocute someone, but it would be a massive blow if it was all ruined. Logically Zach was still trying to bridge the gap over the things he thought were possible, and the things that had happened. He tried to run the programme, but immediately error messages started blinking up at with codes he had never even heard of.

“Fuck.” He muttered to himself, quietly but with intense passion.

He started scrolling down the pages of codes he had spent hours on. It was hard to pick out anything strange; they all looked normal, just as he had input them. Zach almost swallowed his tongue when he got to the bottom of the logue. It was a jumble of letters and numbers.

10001iowpihgka;jg;run.exe:: righthereehb5ictukLkfV4tsRQFETshhuzb9VHonruqlOI;JMCQLnc0)) utqm#//N1yGMBhre2wHxbxmWYcwTne1KTgg4DeNNU6IjP13EBcUnnn7b5LCL19eXtyZtoXA5UaBs1so;ianu;moeQQ1930P1`74P31OwEJfe]][LKEHKeio;unr??Pexm;xjLh;x3mje;whaf;e__SAME

Zach partially felt relieved that his work wasn’t completely ruined, but he felt icy fingers clawing down his back. It had to be a coincidence, rationally. There was nothing to read into it. His code had fucked up something bonkers, generated a bunch of random shit and screwed with the hardware. He ignored the pressing reality that a coding programme causing a computer to go bezerk was something he had never heard of before in his life. Same. Same. Same. That was the first in-joke, the cornerstone of his friendship with Will. Same. They had been playing some stupid game, Connect-4 or some equivalent. Zach found he could simultaneously crack Will up and distract him from winning by replying to everything he said with ‘same’. The joke hadn’t gone away, not even by the last weeks that Will was alive. Zach could remember rubbing his back as he cried and mumbling the word 'same', for a lack of a better apparatus for being emotionally supportive.

He was so spaced out that Jensen kicking the door open startled him.

“Watch it!” He called over his shoulder, frowning and clutching his hand. It was wrapped in a thick white gauze. Zach felt a hot surge of guilt. Jensen seemed way more preoccupied with finding out how he got injured, but at the end of the day he had gotten hurt trying to help him. “Lanky fucktard looked like he was trying to walk clean through me! Idiot.” Jensen tutted, smoothing the bandage over his palm and leaning over to look at the screen of my computer. “Oh wow, it’s on. What’s that clusterfuck?” He squinted closer at the mess of digits.

“Something I definitely didn’t write.” Zach replied, tartly. “Think it caused the computer to go on the fritz?”

“I have never ever heard of something like that happening before in my life. I don’t even know how it would be possible.” He leaned back for a moment, hands clasped around the back of his head. Zach wondered if he was going to start meditating for a moment before he bumped him with his knee. “Scoot over a sec.” Zach obediently scooted.

He watched as Jensen fluently tapped a host of shortcuts, pulling up a basic diagnostic screen. His fingers moved deftly across the keyboard despite the hefty bandage dwarfing his right hand. His pale eyes drank in all of the data in front of him. Zach became mildly engrossed with how he chewed lightly on his bottom lip as he worked. He justified it to himself as a form of competence-porn. No one else he knew could use a computer like Jensen, it was incredibly impressive to watch. His fingers were really long and pale, and Zach could clearly map the veins and working sinew in his hands and wrists, like the skin was almost translucent.

He was knocked abruptly out of his reverie by Jensen flopping backwards with a whine. “It’s… Fine. Absolutely fine. There’s no sign of anything that could cause a computer to short-circuit.”

“Fucking weird, man.” Zach said, clearing his throat the best he could. It had gone a tiny bit dry.

“Honestly, so fucking weird.” Jensen stood up and returned to his computer, still chattering away. “You have the worst luck! Hey, send me the whole file, including the rand-o code at the bottom. I wanna run some diagnostics tests.”

“You think it could have caused it?” Zach asked, still desperately wanting there to be some rational kernel of truth to explain everything that had transpired.

Jensen simply pursed his lips. “I don’t know what else could have. Nothing happens spontaneously, there’s always a cause. Also, move computers. I wanna take a part the hard drive. There was crazy noise coming out of that thing, I don’t see how it’s running so smoothly now.”

Zach nodded, packing up his stuff. “I think I’m just going to finish the lab report in the library, I’ve had enough of codes today.” Jensen nodded, half-hearing him as he started pulling out tiny screwdrivers, from where Zach could not specify.

He called over as he was half out the door. “Definitely take this as a compliment, but you are a lightning rod for bizarreness, Zach Scuderi.”

Zach smiled half-heartedly and waved, knowing it to be true but also not being sure it ever translated into anything good for him personally, even if Jensen liked it.

***

You get home from school, much like you have every day before this. But at the same time something feels loose in your head, strange and disconnected like the plug you left dangling out of it’s socket in the computer room. All the hopes of a normal day you had seem redundant now. You feel a bit pathetic really, knocked off-kilter by a malfunctioning computer and some ill-formed code. It was stupid. It was coincidental. In reality you had got lucky, no need to rewrite any of your coursework. 

“I’m boned for the math test.”  
“Same.”

“That’s it, I’m running it down mid.”  
“Same.”

“Fuck! I spilled my coffee.”  
“Pfft, same.”

“I guess deep down, I’m really scared about growing up.”  
“Same.”

Your head is spinning with memories you spent all day deflating and packing up into closed boxes. They have been upended and strewn around your mind like an angry throwing a tantrum. Or like Will’s room; everything flung anywhere. It feels a lot like navigating that now, but instead of stepping over empty water bottles and dirty boxers, you are tripping over dormant thoughts that have returned to rear their heads, relishing the freedom that you deprived them of for a matter of hours. You are so tired. You are so sick of every little thing dragging you back to the past, like the present is conspiring against you. Like the entire universe wants to pull you back into the quicksand that you spend all of your energy managing to pry yourself out of. It was a short-lived victory. You can feel it pulling at your clothes, your skin, your soul. It makes you feel heavy, like you want to lie in bed forever and not have to deal with science class or your friends or figuring out why you made a computer explode earlier. You crave numbness more than anything else. You want to drift into a dreamless sleep, where life cannot touch you. You pull your duvet over your head and pretend like you don’t have math homework to do.

The combination of dark and warm and the smell of your sheets make you feel safer, but that only paves the way for the waves of self-loathing to crash over you. Now you feel pathetic. You are an eighteen year old man, who cannot cope with a simple day of school. You need to get a grip. Everyone else has. Hai is bored, even. You’re so starved of attention you get hot under the collar watching someone _use a computer?_ You think about Jensen, his pale searching eyes and his pink aggravated lower lip. The long line of his throat. Is that hot? Are you gay? Are you being oversensitive? You really can’t tell right now. You liked Will, but you fucked Jenabella. You did also like Jenabella, and she only slept with you once, probably because you were that bad at it. And your small crush on Will was probably only a weird hero-worship-bffs thing. You realise the problem is recursive.

You shove all of that away and out of your mind. You are probably straight. You are just deeply, deeply lonely. You got scared by a monitor overloading, over analysed some things, and _that_ made you want to cry? What a mess. You’re a mess. You try to breathe, in for five seconds, out for five seconds. Again and again until the tide abates and you feel a little less panicky and nauseous. You curl up small, small enough that you could just fold up out of existence, into nothing. You are slightly attracted to the idea of not existing right now. You know you wouldn’t hurt yourself, not seriously. You know firsthand how much it sucks when people vanish, and you don’t even have an excuse. You would be doing it because you’re selfish. You are selfish. You pluck the dead out of their comfortable resting places and use them to torment yourself. You squeeze your eyes shut and pretend you’re somewhere else.

“Hey man, what’s wrong?” You can conjure him up so well, the furrowed brow, the gentle lilt to his voice that only comes with concern. Usually his tone is sharp, hard, mocking. But when Will thought you were upset he changed; after you fell over in recess, after you argued with your dad, after someone made fun of your glasses, he was there. Will would purse his lips and sit down next to you, his words laced with amenity sounded so soft and gentle. You hate how confused the tenses are. Is or was? Sound or sounded? Does it even matter, if they’re imaginary? You want to confide in this strange spectre you have summoned but now it seems silly, disingenuous. You would talk to Will about it if he were alive. But he isn’t. And you know that somewhere along the road you will find a piece of armour that can stop that blade piercing you, but you haven’t found it yet. You can’t even imagine what it would look like, what could ever make the sting of loss fade, but you have faith that it is out there, and that is enough for now.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> officially back on my bullshit, enjoi

I was midway through the process of carefully balancing four paper cubes I had folded on top of each other. Origami wasn’t actually my thing, my hands usually too clumsy to fold things in anything resembling a straight line, but the math substitute had opened his mouth and the only thing coming out as far as I could tell was a long, boring honk with some algebra sprinkled in. It was like his voice was designed to be tuned out. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t be expected to focus! Not when the school had hired a fucking white-noise machine to teach me on a sunny Friday afternoon. So I had started fiddling and tearing up the bottom of my work sheet. I had made a cube and felt a surge of immense satisfaction. Look at me, making things. Creating! I was officially a creative genius. I was also in a fantastic mood. The Worst Week Of The Year(™) was almost over. I was feeling so jubilant I made another few cubes and arranged them into a town. Midway through deciding which house would be mayor, I decided it was dumb and wanted to stack them instead. I was beginning to envision the world’s largest paper-cube-tower and how I could be it’s proud founder, when the tannoy spluttered to life in the top corner of the classroom. The crackling sliced through the drone of the substitute teacher. A few students around the room jerked awake in shock. A kid sitting directly to my left almost spilled out of her seat with a gasp she was roused out of such a deep sleep.

“Ahem, good afternoon everyone. Could Zachary Scuderi, Hai Lam and An Le report to the principal’s office immediately, please.” 

I stared at the loudspeaker. It had to be a joke. A cruel prank played by the loudspeaker-people who wanted a monopoly on the paper-cube-tower industry. I was in too deep. I knew too much. I kept waiting for confetti cannons to burst and for the whole thing to be laughed off. It didn’t and by that point ninety percent of my classmates were side-eyeing at me, waiting for me to leave. The pregnant pause swelled for another few seconds before Jenabella turned around in her seat to look at me for the first time in almost a year. She sat three rows in front and two columns to the right and she hadn’t even spared me a glance for the entire year we had been sat in the same room. I felt the hot dagger of rejection wiggle around in my gut. We locked eyes and there was nothing, no flicker of warmth or recognition. I made her laugh before, I swear! She actually really seemed to like me. Now I didn’t exist. Hero to Zero, just like that. I wish I could remember anything about Junior Prom besides watching Daerek vomit into some bushes, the burning trail that she kissed down my neck before she sucked me off in her car, giggling like a maniac with Hai standing on the fire escape outside the auditorium, how mad she was when I smudged her eyeliner, how everything felt so fucking good but I was so drunk and I couldn’t fit it all together. 

I woke up the next morning figuring she would be my girlfriend from then on, right after I was done puking out my hangover. I sent her a message that she never replied to. I’m pretty sure it’s still lingering on my phone, I could check it if I want to start my self-hatred session of the week off with a real doozy. I swallowed the dryness that threatened to overwhelm my mouth, gathered up my things and left the room without a word to anyone. The ritual communal taunts of “whatcha do?” and the ever-witty chorus of “ooooooh!” didn’t make an appearance. The three of us were well-known as the President, chairman and treasurer of the Dead Best Friend Club, and I knew it too. 

My feet dragged all the way down the linear halls of my high school, each as bland as the next. I wondered if Principal Patterson had some more pseudo-sentimental drivel to foist upon me. I took my time, dawdling the entire way to the office, hoping to bump into Hai or An before we were all trapped inside the loving but thoroughly unwanted embrace of our principal. No such luck ensued, typically. In fact my tardiness had massively disadvantaged me. The secretary to the principal waved me through with a hint of irritation as I opened my mouth to squeak out my name. I felt a rock settle at the bottom of my stomach. I had come to enjoy people asking me name, not knowing who I was upon sight. Anonymity was nice, safe, cosy. I could be Sneaky online and “I’m sorry, Zachary who?” in real life.

I pushed the door open to meet An and Hai’s dismayed glances, both sat on equally ugly plastic chairs in the centre of the room. So far, so expected. What really threw me through a loop was the man leaning against Patterson’s desk: Officer Turley. He smiled at me as I entered the room, but my mouth only twitched in response. Turley had delivered me so much bad news over the years. 

“Have you seen your friend Will since yesterday?”

“Did he say anything about wanting to run away, or leave Maryville?”

“They’ve found nothing. I’m sorry.”

I feel each sentence brush past me as they flit like ghouls between us. I feel the cold, rank breath of memories I wish I didn’t have. I know he’s probably thinking about the last time we spoke properly, the way my fifteen-year-old face crumpled into tears. 

“Hi, Zach. Thank you for joining us.”

Patterson’s face shines with geniality as he gestures towards another one of the ratchet plastic chairs leaning against the wall. I drag it over, wishing he was less genuine and kind. Then it would be less irrational for my gut to thrash as I leant back on the precarious plastic. I exchanged a glance with Hai and he only offers me a grimace. He doesn’t know why he’s here yet, clearly. Hai’s powers of nonverbal communication have saved my ass on many an occasion. I don’t know how, but I always know what excuse to give if he’s in the room. It’s all about the eyebrow slant, and right now Hai has no information to give me, no pointers. The ball is entirely in Turley’s court as he clears his throat.

“Hello again boys. I know it’s been a long time, but we have news. Some new evidence has come to light regarding the Will Hartman case.” 

An sucks in a breath so hard I almost feel the oxygen count of the room drop around me. Conversely, on my other side Hai has stopped breathing entirely. My heart is thudding so hard I think it might fall out. We haven’t had new evidence in four years. The case was cold almost as soon as it began; a younger, more optimistic part of me jumps out of its seat. Turley pressed on, electing to ignore the sudden charge of the room.

“Will’s mother dropped off a few things of his when she came through town, including his laptop.”

“And?” Hai blurts out. He claps a hand over his mouth and cringes, but his eyes are blazing. I’m right there with him. I need the point of this sentence immediately, not after Turley has set the fucking scene. I want any news, anything that can give me some closure. 

“Well, we were doing a routine sweep on Will’s laptop, just in case there was anything that we missed, and we found a whole bunch of encrypted files. Heavily encrypted stuff, that has no business being on a fifteen-year-old’s computer.”

Prompted by Hai’s directness, I pipe up. My voice sounds like a caterwaul in my own ears, scraping over a bone-dry throat. “Will was a very sophisticated programmer, we met Hai and An became of middle school computer club he made me join with him.” 

“He was better than the teacher, even then.” An supplied hoarsely.

Turley nodded pursing his lips. “That may be so, and we managed to get a little ways into cracking a few. They led to a secret internet chat room, which lead us to re-evaluate our understandings of Will’s internet presence. We weren’t so hot about this online stuff before when we originally closed the case as cold. We can’t access the log of the chat or see any of its contents, but we did find an internet handle which we back-searched.”

He pulled a piece of paper out of a file resting on the desk beside him and handed it to Hai. “A profile on a site largely based around.. Well…”

Hai squinted at the page. I leant over shamelessly. It wasn’t a good xerox, and before I could really decipher what I was looking at Hai barked out a dry laugh. “Gay hookups?”

I almost fell out my chair with the double-take that wracked my body. Hai let me pull the piece of paper out of his hands and I held it up an inch away from my glasses, trying to make everything in my head flow together cohesively.

_Meteos, 18._  
Not looking for anything serious, but never turned down anything fun. ;)  
Computer enthusiast, skateboarder, all around babe.  
‘Verse bottom. Will probably suck your dick.   
Maryville, KS. 

Turley ploughed on with his speech. “We have a new theory. Will was seeing an older man, maybe from out of town, before he disappeared. Is there _anything_ you can think of that might have something to do with this?”

My tongue felt heavy. I spat out the only thoughts in my head. “What the fuck. No way. He told me everything.”

I didn’t care if Will was gay. Maybe a big part of me always knew that Will was gay. He never talked about any girls, never even cared about them. But I really cared, very deeply, if he was out fucking random men and he’d never thought to mention it to me. He must have deliberately kept it from me, in fact. I was always under the impression that even when we were apart I knew what he was up to: probably chilling in his room, playing some video games. Same as me. Blaring up at me from the page in my hands was evidence that Will had some secret life. Some secret, sordid life that he kept me out of. That he had lied to me about.

The pity in the police officer’s eyes made my stomach roll, as soon as I said the words. “Did he tell you about this?” He asked, holding up another printout of Will’s profile. Hai and An looked at me as well, to add insult to injury. They all thought I had some revelation at hand. Some private nugget of information I had kept to myself, when really I bawled out everywhere I could possibly think of where Will might be over a desk in the Maryville Police Department too many years ago. 

Any smart ideas or protests died on my tongue as I locked eyes with Hai and An, their expectant gazes dissolving my resolve like wet ashes. I shook my head, all of my words lost inside my skull, smashing away like a discordant symphony. Will was gay? Will had a secret boyfriend? Turns out you didn’t know anything about that guy you entrusted every inch of your soul? Haha. Guess that wasn’t mutual. Nice recurring theme in your life, idiot.

“Can any of you think of anything at all?” Turley pressed, my gaze boring an abyss into the linoleum between my feet. I had nothing to offer and I knew it.

“No.”

“Honestly, nothing. This was a secret from us.”

An and Hai croaked out their respective answers and the silence gaped open for a few awkward seconds. I wanted to jump out of my seat and warn everyone that reality was collapsing around their heads and they needed to start running now if they wanted to get out safe, but I knew deep down it was only affecting me. I didn’t think a single coherent thought for the rest of the time I sat there, counting ugly ochre flakes in the beige floor until Hai tugged my sleeve. I let him manhandle me out of the office and wished I could have stayed there tallying up patterns for the rest of my life whilst the world trundled on with it’s shitty business without me.

*****

The three boys sloped out of the office and past the secretary without a word. They stopped outside and stared at each other for a few seconds, nonplussed. The silence sprawled out between them, careering down the halls, bouncing off every locker front and panelled ceiling, reverberating, counterintuitively blaring and ugly in its nothingness. Zach felt like his intestines were going to drop out of his body. He did what he always did in a crisis; he looked to Hai. An was doing the same, staring at their de facto leader as he chewed on his bottom lip.

“Well,” started Hai, letting out a deep breath. “I’m gonna go try to bum a cigarette from one of those goth kids outside. Then probably go home and stare at a wall for the rest of the day.”

“Jesus Christ, dude.” An said, to no one in particular as they trailed behind him. 

“And I owe Daerek twenty bucks, fuck.” Hai commented as he pushed the door open and lead them outside, Zach still not in a state to contribute to the conversation with his voice box swollen like a tennis ball.

“Why do you owe him twenty bucks?” An asked as soon as Hai came back from soliciting a smoke from a guy with way too much gel in his hair and far too little manual dexterity to give himself a convincing mohawk.

Hai shrugged, exhaling a cloud of stinking vapour. His voice was steady but the two fingers had had clamped around his cigarette were tight and trembling slightly. “He thought Will was gay, I thought he was bi, we put a bet on it when we were like, twelve or something ridiculous.”

Zach couldn’t help but blurt. “You knew?”

In that moment he hated knowing all of Hai’s tells. He knew the shaking hands were stress and fear and the rush of things that he, in all of his plotting and intelligence, had not accounted for. He also knew that the slant in his eyebrows read as pure pity. “Well I assumed, yeah. Didn’t you?”

“He knew everything about me. Everything. And he didn’t say a fucking word to me about any of this.” Zach spat the words. He was furious. Furious with Will for lying, Hai for feeling sorry for him, with everyone for expecting him to have some special insight. He was angriest at himself, because he had perpetuated that particular lie for the longest. He honestly had thought he had a special insight on Will. And it turned out he was as ignorant as everyone else, fuck Will’s _mailman_ knew the same amount as he did about this shit.

“Zach…” An tried to pat his shoulder but he jerked away, fraught and not in the mood for platitude.

“No, this is so much bullshit.” Zach could feel his voice wobbling and he struggled to talk in an even tone. “I thought he was my best friend and turns out I never knew the first thing about him.”

“They could be wrong,” argued An. “Him disappearing and having a profile on a hook-up site could just be correlation without causation.”

“It makes way more sense than him spontaneously combusting on his walk from school, though.” Zach replied stonily. Everything felt unreal and disconnected, like he had been sat down and gently presented with conclusive evidence that gravity wasn’t real. 

Their silence was telling, and it echoed even louder than the previous one. This was the best explanation they had ever got, and they all knew it.

“Everyone has secrets, dude. Even Will.” Hai chided him gently, puffing on his cigarette. 

Zach stiffened, his stomach tugging with misdirected anger. He knew deep down that Hai was right, but he felt betrayed and deceived and it wasn’t like he could take it up with Will himself; because he had fucked off and gotten himself killed trying to get some dick. 

“You wouldn’t understand.” Zach spat, spinning on his heel and leaving.

He stalked home without signing out of class or even getting his other things from his locker, his vision clouded with red raw tendrils of anger. Once he got to his house he kept walking. He couldn’t be inside, he couldn’t sit in his room and think and wonder what else he hadn’t known about Will. He stormed onwards, trying to think of a single place in this godforsaken town that was his. Not his-and-his-friends, not his-and-Will’s. He needed solitude, privacy. He needed to get away from the feeling that the spectre he toted on his shoulder wasn’t one he should trust. It hadn’t ever trusted him. He kept walking until he got to the creek on the far side of his neighborhood and then he followed it. Stepping carefully along the riverbank distracted him. As he traversed the narrow planks he felt some of his emotions decentralise and he picked through them carefully, each of his feet making precise movements to get him from A to B. He felt betrayed. Rejected on some levels. But now his anger was turning into fear as the molten self-centred core of his hurt began to leak. Will had been kidnapped by some man. Some random man, who thought he was eighteen and definitely had some sexual interest vested.

Zach almost lost his footing as he staggered to one side to douse the foliage in a spray of his vomit. He choked and heaved and threw up again, spitting out bitter saliva. His vision swam with a kaleidoscope of his breakfast dribbling over greenery and an unstoppable onslaught of mental images. Will being held down, Will being raped, Will being murdered. Did he do it slow? Was he in pain? Phrases from NCIS and Criminal Minds echoed around his mind: predator; deranged psychopath; sexual sadist. They never found his body, did it still even exist? Buried in some stranger’s garden across state lines. Decomposed by acid. Eaten by pigs. Zach let a final wave of nausea wrack his body before he pressed onwards. They had some answers, at the price of a thousand more questions, each he was less keen to understand than the last.

He only made it another hundred metres upstream before he had to sit down. All he could think about were enormous, coarse, calloused hands grabbing Will. By his wrists, by his shoulder. His bony hips dwarfed by stronger palms. Chunky fingers covering Will’s mouth, twisting in his hair. Zach retched but nothing came up. It wasn’t until he wiped his mouth he realised tears had been running in rivulets down his face, his cheeks soaked and his lips bitter with stomach acid and salt. 

“What did you do?” He croaked out. “Why wouldn’t you have told me?”

He knew it was a little childish but he was alone and so afraid, afraid for someone who had been dead for four years. It made him feel sick all over again that truth wasn’t relative; whether he knew about it or not this had happened to Will. All that daydreaming about him being lost, or kidnapped by some bonkers but harmless pseudo-Amish folk didn’t matter. His best friend was most likely murdered by some man he met on an online chat room. Quite probably sexually abused first. His breath caught in his throat every time he tried to suck in a breath. 

“Oh God. Oh God Will, what did he do to you?”

All he could imagine were agonies. The technicalities were just a smear across the cinema screen that played out in technicolour. He didn’t care about whether Will went with this stranger because he wanted to, because he was forced, whatever stupidity had got him into it. Will screaming. Will crying. Will trapped and afraid. Will’s legs being forced apart. Zach didn’t know he had it in him, literally, but he puked again. Right between his ankles into the stream. He watched his stomach lining wash away through his blurry eyes before hugging his knees to his chest and trying to regulate his breathing.

This was a lead. This was another step closer to answers. He was just beginning to doubt that he wanted all of the garish truth; ignorance had been unfulfilling but comfortable. Like an office job. It reminded him of Maryville, of his life. A beige backdrop cast aside by the fresh pantomime of horror that dogged his mind. 

He wasn’t sure how long he sat there before his phone buzzed. His first instinct was to throw it in the creek, but he knew that was a rash and expensive habit to develop. Despite himself he checked it- it could be more information on the case. 

**FROM: HAI [14:55]** hey listen man i know ur rlly mad and upset  
 **FROM: HAI [14:56]** but we gotta regroup, hmu when you get this

Zach wanted to blank the message, quite badly. He couldn’t cope with Hai drawing up his battle plans and assembling his troops like this was just another menial thing he could disseminate with sheer force of will. But he also knew he couldn’t sit in the middle of a forest forever, and even if he could the nymph lifestyle clearly wasn’t for someone as attached to gaming and hot pockets as him. And he knew that seeing his friends would help deep down. They had the same fears as him, and the same goals.

**TO: HAI [15:00]** I’m here. Ducked out of school early.

His phone beeped twice, in quick succession. 

**FROM: HAI [15:01]** same here. cant sit around doing nothing or ill go insane.   
**FROM: HAI [15:01]** come 2 lemon’s place asap

Zach smirked despite himself and began to pick his way towards town, grimacing as he edged his way around a pool of his own vomit. He hadn’t called Daerek ‘Lemon’ in years. Daerek had been infamous all throughout their middle school; quiet and unremarkable besides the fact that every recess, when most kids would pull out a bag of chips or a banana, Daerek would sit comfortably on the playground and eat two whole lemons. Kids would wait around specifically by the tree where he loitered to watch him do it, just out of sheer fascination. There were rumours that he didn’t have any tastebuds. Zach could remember in fourth grade when Will had dragged him to watch. Daerek had either become used to having a small audience, or was entirely oblivious. He was just happily eating half a lemon, engrossed in doodling in a notebook. Daerek still carried around notebooks to this day. The pair had lurked round the corner near his tree, a few other kids nearby had also come to gawp. Even teachers knew about it, the sports coach Krasinski had started the trend for calling him Lemon. After an own-clothes day the year before when Daerek had worn a yellow shirt, the name had stuck.

“He doesn’t even flinch, dude.” Will had breathed, half-horrified and half-impressed. 

Zach had shrugged, shifting his feet back and forth. “We shouldn’t spy on him, so what if he likes lemons? They’re a regular fruit. You like tonnes of weird stuff.”

“Do not.”

“Do to!”

“I just want to know if he does it because he actually likes them, or it’s some weird… Publicity stunt.” Will whispered loudly, edging around to get a better view.

Zach rolled his eyes. He couldn’t understand the hype, and it seemed rude. Lemon had never been mean to him before. “This would be the weirdest publicity stunt ever. If you want to know, ask him. I want to go play Pokemon.”

“Huh. Okay then.” Zach ducked his head in embarrassment as Will shouted over, always willing to call his bluff. “Hey! Lemons! What’s your name?”

Daerek’s head jerked up at the sound of his nickname and pushed his glasses up his nose to squint at Will, distracted from his notebook. “Me? I’m Daerek.”

“Do you actually like eating lemons?” Will blurted out, too far committed to walk away now.

“Uh, yeah. Why... else would I eat them?” Daerek replied slowly.

“Publicity stunt?” Zach whispered, acidly. 

Will kicked his leg and shrugged. “I don’t know.” He changed the subject in the only way he knew how, abruptly. “What are you doing in your notebook?”

Daerek hugged the notebook to his chest a little. “Drawings.”

“Of what?”

“...stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?” Will refused to be perturbed by Daerek’s secrecy and bounded up to him to peek at his book.

Daerek relented and showed him the page, “I’ve drawn a dragon.”

“Whoa. Cool, did you copy it?” Will’s eyes were bright. “Zach come look at this, this is so awesome, how did you come up with this?”

Zach had sidled over a little more sheepishly, but lost his bashful demeanor when he saw it was in fact an awesome drawing. Since then Daerek had been Lemon, and since then Daerek had been their friend. Had been his friend. Will didn’t exist anymore, and when he had Zach had only known the half of it. A snippet of his true existence. Zach realised that it had never crossed his mind that perhaps he only knew a small part of Will, despite all the time they spent together, the memories seared into the wet geometry of his brain, all the secrets and laughter and irrevocable trust that Zach had bestowed upon Will, without ever questioning it since he had been seven- Will might have been a person beyond Zach. That scared him, because he wasn’t sure he was ever a person beyond Will, when he was alive. It terrified him. His whole identity had been subsumed by a person he didn’t even really know, for as long as he could remember. It terrified him with how humiliating that was. How much of an indication that he was weak and weird and was no good at existing.

Zach wasn’t sure who he was angry at- Will, himself, Will but he had no outlet for that anger so it just looped round back to him, the cops for not finding this sooner, some looming figure who could have kidnapped and murdered his best friend. He took some deep breaths. He wanted to hit someone. He wanted to cry because if Will had told him about this four years ago he would have told him in his childish way that it was sketchy, and maybe he would have deleted the profile. Maybe that way Will wouldn’t have died. Zach realised there was little doubt in his mind that was what happened. There was no other convincing narrative. He had stopped trying to find one, between hundred-volunteer sweeps of the hills around the dump and the dogs smelling nothing every time they were let loose, from circulating ‘missing’ posters all around the state, to seeing his best friend stare at him from the side of milk cartons. There had been no news. Until now, a shining, neon clue. Will had lied about his age online, had even put the town he lived in a few lines below. It was like something out of a True Crime documentary they would have watched together, eerie in its cold randomness and simplicity.

*****

The front door to the Hart family home isn’t open but you know the key is stashed in the exact same spot under the potted cactus on the porch where it has been for over a decade. The decor inside hasn’t changed either, all soothing magnolias and hardwood, and you cannot override your instincts to toe off your shoes and leave them in the hall even though you’re 99.9% sure Daerek’s mom isn’t here. Just goes to show she wielded the appropriate amount of fear over you as kids: the best cookies in the neighbourhood if you followed her house rules, the kind of grown-up sharp words that make you feel a centimetre tall if you failed. Once, when you were almost ten, the five of you ruined a carpet upstairs (because trying to construct your own bunsen burners with no fire safety equipment was never going to be a wholly positive experience) and out of sheer terror, Daerek had hid in your loft for close to a whole evening.

Mrs Hart _had_ been furious about the carpet, but that anger was only infinitesimal compared to how pissed she had been at Daerek for taking off without so much as a note. You can remember walking this exact route up to the top of the house, padding in your socked feet when they swallowed up less of each step that feels too small and shallow now, whispering with Lemon like talking about what was happening at full volume would make it real.

“Will wouldn’t just up and leave. No way, Zach. You remember when my mom sat us down after I ran away that time?”

You had nodded, nonplussed by the connection he was drawing.

“He said to me afterwards how bad he felt for suggesting I just come and hide at yours. I guess he felt kind of responsible for the whole thing. My mom went to his place first and it must have bothered him how upset she was. Like really bothered him. No way he would do this on purpose.”

“Will’s probably just lost somewhere out by the dump. They’re wrong. He’s gonna show up.” You insisted dryly, your brain stubbornly refusing to absorb any alternative.

The childish whisper you remember of Lemon crescendos into his adult voice, taut and raised as you climb to the top of the house. Your heart flips as you catch sight of the door to the attic, still adorned with the sign you made for it together- “DO NOT DISTURB!” with a little epitaph written in marker by each of you. You let your eyes slide over them as you try to gauge what is happening behind the door, and right away you laugh. Hai literally has never changed: scrawled in green marker, nine-year-old Hai Lam didn’t want to be disturbed because in his own words he was, “CONQUERING THE KNOWN UNIVERSE”’. To the left Daerek and An had constantly impeded on each other’s contributions, one being of the opinion they should be killing monsters, and the other taming them. You had written two short but expressive words for yours: BUTT ROCKETS. Underneath, Will had written a post script (“like rockets, but for your butt!”). His own message was next to yours, in the same blue as the messy post script: “busy building a computer to pass the Turing Test!”. You had insisted he should write something cooler than that, but he hotly protested that Alan Turing _was_ cool.

You remember how distraught he was when the reality of what words like “suicide” and “chemical castration” meant dawned on him. You rubbed his back as he cried, not really understanding his pain but desperately wanting to absorb some of it, to take it away and make it your own through the palm of a hand. He even emailed the British government, telling them they sucked and that he hated them. You guess it’s as diplomatically advanced as you can expect a broken-hearted eleven year old to be. Now it makes you think, as time and new information and your now-adult mind always forces you to scrutinize Will, down to analysing him as a sixth grader. Did he love Alan Turing because he related to him? As a gay, brilliant, computer geek who had it rough in his time? Who both died before they should have? You aren’t sure, and it’s not like you can ask. Another mystery to line your brain with. Another strange, intangible inquiry that you will no doubt torture yourself with subliminally until you die. 

You know that now is the time to focus on real mysteries with real answers, even if they are not what you want to hear, at least they are true. Concrete. Tangible. You want to bury a real person in that grave marked ‘William Hartman’. You decide there is no space any more for the alluring eddies of questions only a dead kid can answer; you will lay him to rest, and you will try, perhaps even start, to let him go. You clear your throat as discreetly as you can and enter the attic. Lemon is standing with his back to you, gesticulating wildly. “...But the cops in this town are incompetent and I’m ready to pull some vigilante-shit! What the fuck! How did they not catch this before?”

He whirls around, a little out of breath and clearly in this rant for the long-haul. “Zach! Zach I am so fucking mad right now. And I know you’re sad, and none of this is easy for you in particular, but I need you to do something for me. I need you to peel back all that sad, and find some part of you in all that hurt that is a quarter as pissed as I am, because we need to act.”

You almost feel buffeted by Daerek’s intensity, imagining your bangs waving in the breeze generated by his ravings. It’s comedic, but it is also energising. You really don’t have to search very far to find the anger. It’s been bubbling for years and now it sears your throat as you speak.

“I’m… not sad. Well, I am sad. But sadness is secondary. Guys, I want- no fuck that, I _need_ to know what happened to Will.” You cringe at how your voice cracks but you don’t stop talking. “I am never going to be able to come back to this town if I don’t, I-I don’t think I’ll be able to like myself if I don’t pour everything I have into this. If I don’t put it all on the line, and give it this one last shot, a part of me is going to feel guilty forever. And I don’t want to be constantly running away from the past and feeling like shit about it.”

An nods. “We have to meet the past head-on, shake it down and try to find out everything it knows.”

“So we’re all agreed then,” Hai says as he gets to his feet, shimmying his skinny ass out of a beanbag. “We are solving this.” You shiver a little at his tone, because it’s the cold, calculating voice of Hai Lam in I Am Going To Get What I Want, And Demolish Everything That Stands in My Way Mode. 

“I wanted to check everyone was on board first,” he continues as he rummages in his bag and pulls out a thick black folder, “because I spent all afternoon updating this.” He flops it onto the floor with a loud ‘thunk’, so you can all read the title, written across the front cover in tip-ex. 

“THE DISAPPEARANCE OF WILL HARTMAN”

An stoops to pick it up. “Christ Hai, this is… Enormous.”

“It contains every piece of research I have on when Will went missing; timelines, theories, interviews I conducted with everyone who knew him, even a copy of the case file that Turley let me have once it was pronounced cold.”

You almost want to laugh, because the tome that An is leafing through is all of Hai’s grief condensed into bulletpoints, contents pages and evidence.

“You made a binder? For Will’s death?” Daerek asks, disbelievingly. 

“I make a binder for _everything_ Lemon. Especially important stuff.”

“Well, it’s certainly going to come in helpful now.” You comment as you stand on tiptoes to see over An’s shoulder. There is a huge amount of colour-coding going on, on every page you can see. It actually makes it incredibly hard to read.

“How many packs of highlighters did you go through making this?” An asked incredulously, tracing his finger down an index and flipping through pages as he spoke.

“Enough to substantially decrease my allowance, but I’ve always had a big stationary budget accounted for.” Hai retorted, matter-of-factly. “The point I want us to tackle is, how can we use all of this to augment the new information we have?”

“We need to find out who he was talking to on that site. Also, it’s not like Will’s parents were particularly nosy. What did he need a tone of encrypted stuff on his laptop for?” Lemon mused aloud as the rest of the room kicked into action, An pulling sheafs of paper out of the binder and handing them to you as you settle down next to him and Hai tugging the long-abandoned chalk board out of its drawer and onto its legs. A tiny mushroom cloud of dust looses from inside the easel. 

“Christ, I remember this thing being so much bigger,” Hai mumbles before turning around and speaking louder. “Knowing Will it could be anything from porn, to dark-net shit, to GTA hacks. And in order to access any of that we’d have to steal it from evidence in the Sheriff’s office.”

You snort in laughter at the idea of the four of you- you the gaming recluse, the bearded web designer, the captain of the volleyball team and one tiny powerhouse, pulling off a heist in the Maryville Sheriff Department. “Yeah... “ You say out loud. “I don’t fancy our chances of that. Let’s focus on what we have.”

“The dating website?” Daerek rubs his beard, and grabs his messenger bag. “I did some scoping.”

“Find anyone cute?” You ask as innocently as possible

He throws a cushion in your face as he waits for his laptop to warm up. “No, _asshat_ but I did find Will’s profile with the handle Hai mentioned. There’s no way to see who his other matches or contacts on it are.”

“Fuck.” Hai exhales softly. “Back to square one.”

“Not necessarily…” An begins slowly, “look I don’t want to suggest anything illegal but… Could we hack the server of the site? In a totally non-legal fashion? And access all of his chat logs that way?”

You can’t help but grin. “Hai’ll make an evil genius out of you yet, An Le.”

“Hey, he’s always been kind of evil, do you not remember the era of the monster-killing obsession?” Daerek interjects, “when we could have just _tamed_ them!”

“Oh my god Daerek, this beef is over a decade old at this point.” An giggles.

“And yet, still relevant.” Daerek says wistfully, staring into the middle distance like he’s wrapping up and after-school special. You throw the cushion back at him and ask the next big question: “Would any of us even know how to hack into a site like that? One that is no doubt designed to be secure as all fuck, because there have got to be a million dick pics floating around on their servers and they definitely don’t want the lawsuit that comes with that getting loose.”

“No idea, dude.”

“Wouldn’t even know where to start.”

“Fuck.” Hai exhales, again. “I could probably find someone on the internet who would do it though, for money.”

“And can we trust this internet-person?” Daerek asks carefully.

All of a sudden your brain kicks up and into gear, latching onto the novelty of a solvable problem. A small achievable goal was exactly what you need right now.“We might not need an internet-person.” you begin, pissed at yourself for not seeing this solution earlier. “Well, we will need an internet-person, but one from real life. Nicolaj Jensen. I see him in computing a lot, he’s a total whizz at stuff like this.”

“Would he do it for free?” An shoots back immediately. 

You shrug. “He seems like the type who might take a crack at it just for funsies.” You absolutely had pegged Jensen as the kind of guy who would do something just to prove that he could. And although it was a weird project to have to pitch, you like working with Jensen. In a cool, non-creepy, heterosexual, working partner kind of way. The more you try not to think about the weirdness yesterday the more it looms over you. Your hand-fixation has got to stop or it could literally kill you with cringe. 

Daerek just nods appreciatively. “Nice, a daring computer nerd. Can you text him?”

You snort. Despite your peripheral strange feelings towards borderline paraphilic parts of the poor kid, you don’t really interact when you aren’t right next to each other in the computer lab. “Woah we aren’t like, bosom buddies. I don’t have his number. Also hitting someone up like, ‘hi could you hack into this secure server to access a cache for a gay hook-up website?’ is kind of hard to pull off in a breezy and non-creepy fashion!”

Hai purses his lips. “So you’ll do it tomorrow?”

Your half-joking indignation totally wanes as soon as Hai starts glaring even slightly. “First opportunity I get, Captain.” You mock salute, getting a giggle out of Daerek and An.

Hai smiles, “it’s a start. I’m so tired of sitting on my hands and doing fuck-all, we aren’t kids any more. Even if it takes us doing it all ourselves, we are getting to the bottom of this thing once and for all.”

“We’re gonna bring him home.” Daerek says firmly, and the rumble of his voice almost knocks you flat. When did you all get so old? Seeing them all here, against the backdrop of their youth, it’s especially jarring. Every nook and cranny of this room has Daerek in it: aged seven and trying to teach them all to draw, nine and chipping his tooth on the far window-sill, ten and a half arguing about the virtues of twelve-sided dice , eleven and deathly ill with a stomach flu that gutted each of them individually, thirteen and arguing passionately about Final Fantasy stratagems, fourteen and vomiting out of the window after his first time drinking beer. All these spectres lead you to their culmination, the fully grown man standing in the middle of it. 

You look around and swallow the strange nostalgic lump in your throat. You are old now, all of you. Adults. It seemed so far away when this room was the best place in the world, back when your universe could shrink down to whatever game you concocted that day and nothing else weighed on your mind. It seems incredibly far away, like something that happened to someone else. 

You are snapped out of your reverie by An tugging on your arm. “Zach? You fucking dope, do you want to come to the drive through or not?”

You totally do.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> greetings loved ones, let's go on a shitpost

You spent the entire weekend cleansing your soul through a heady combination of ten-hour League stints and sleeping. Unfortunately all it did was make your wrist do that strange twinging thing again and drain your eyes of any fluid they once contained. So now you’re lurking around the computer lab with what could be easily misconstrued as pink eye, massaging your arms partially out of necessity but mostly from anxiety. All your friends, and Will, are relying on you to get this one thing done.

If that one thing was a Q-flash combo, or a dick joke, it’d be plain sailing. But unfortunately it’s not, it all comes down to your… Charisma. Convincing someone to do something weird and sketchy that they wouldn’t do otherwise. You’re really glad your ‘target’ is someone as amiable as Jensen. The clock on the wall ticks onwards in tandem to your left eye twitching. It is half-past one- and of all days for Nicolaj Jensen to miraculously develop a social life and spend lunch somewhere besides on a computer, it just had to be today. You can feel yourself running out of time. You take off your glasses and rub your eyes, slumping into your seat further and idly spinning. Midway through your fourth spin, the door opens with a bang.

Despite your blurry vision and slight dizziness, _because who were you kidding when you said you wanted to be an astronaut in elementary school?_ you can tell it’s Jensen. He is red in the face and panting.

“Fucking… Assholes.” He gasps out and collapses into his usual chair.

“Yo…” You start gently. “Is everything okay?” Not the stellar mood you were looking for in your daydreams about how this would go.

“Not even fucking close, some mouth-breathing retard stole my bag and made me run all around school trying to find it.” Jensen spits, clutching said bag to his chest like you might try to snatch him off it next.

“Top of the flagpole?” You ask knowingly. It’s not exactly an original stunt. You’d had your bag stashed up there, in the girl’s bathroom, in a dumpster, once in an enormous freshly baked casserole in the school kitchen. At least the lunch ladies had your back on that one and got two kids suspended, they were _not_ pleased about having to refire another of those suckers because of some shit-head’s antics. A part of you wants to tell Jensen he got off lucky, but it doesn’t seem like the right time to demean how pissed off he is.

“Fuckin’ bingo. Wish you’d been there to say that half an hour ago.” He seethed. “Jerk-offs didn’t even realise the laptop in this bag has information on it worth more than all their miserable lives combined.”

“They? You know who did it?”

“I have my suspicions. And I will see them confirmed or denied, and reproach punishment.” Jensen’s voice is cold and flat, and you wish you didn’t have to ask him such a huge favour when he’s clearly having a shitty day.

“Yikes. I’m sure you will, bud.” You let your platitudes hang in the air for a moment before you start talking again. “Listen, Jensen. I need to ask you a favour. A really big favour, so it’s okay if you say no.”

He raises his eyebrows and gestures for you to keep talking as he boots up the desktop in front of him. You had considered a hundred different tactics to approach this with, but the one that kept coming up tops was just being stupidly, plainly honest.

“So… You never knew my friend Will.” You begin slowly.

“Hartman? The guy that memorial last week was for?”

“That’s him. Um, so we got called to the office on Friday, and the Sheriff was there. Said there was new evidence in the case, and he wasn’t lying. Will had a profile on this dating site,” you pull the print-out Hai had made, one for you, one for his files, from your pocket. “Check it.”

Jensen scanned the page. “‘Will definitely suck my dick’, huh? I totally see where you’re going with this. You want me to hack into the site and see who he was talking to, yes?”

“Yeah!” You try to reign it in a little. “Yeah, we would do it ourselves but…”

“You lack the Jensen know-how?” He shoots back, wiggling his eyebrows. You realise his eyes are the palest blue you can imagine.

“Don’t talk about yourself in the third-person, you goon.” You giggle, trying to shove all of your less mission-orientated thoughts up and out of your brain. “If you want like, money for it-”

“No, no way. First one’s free.” He stops midway through banging at his keyboard and speaks a touch slower. “Actually, all of them are free for you.”

“Really?”

“Dude. It’s a fucking _unofficial murder investigation._ Any cyber-shit you need done, I’m your guy. I’m always down for some Nancy Drew shit and I’m so in.”

You can’t help but crack an enormous grin. When does shit ever turn out like this for you? You cannot conceive of how this could have possibly gone better. “Jensen, thank you. Thank you so much, we’d be dead in the water without you.” You try not to gush but you feel so buoyant inside it’s hard not to let your words spill over each other. Step one is down, only a potential million to go.

“No problem, guy. Let me take a crack at it this evening and I’ll… Wait, gimme your cellphone.” You obediently throw Jensen your phone and wait for him to plug in his number and ring it. From inside his bag a tinny rendition of “Happy Birthday” begins to play.

You stare at him. “What.”

“Do I look like the kind of human that has time to download custom text tones? Fuck no, dude. Gimme that default shit. Okay, all saved. I’ll text you as soon as I make any headway.”

“You better have saved my contact as something flattering.” You warn, your mocking tone mellowing as soon as you remember that this guy is saving your ass right now. “I owe you big time.”

Jensen shakes his head as he turns to face you. “I am man who likes to settle debts quickly,” he begins. You think you might have hallucinated it in your stupidly good mood and itchy unfocused vision, but you could have sworn in that moment Jensen’s eyes, his impossibly icy blue eyes, raked you up and down as his mouth stretched into that wolfish smile of his. “I’ll let you know if there’s anything you can do for me.”

You really can’t think of anything clever to say, not in response to that toothy grin and purring tone. There is a long beat of silence,

The bell rings. You cough abruptly and get to your feet, thanking Jensen again over your shoulder as you leave. It’s Algebra again, this time sans annoying substitute. In fairness there could be a human-sized, English-speaking goose at the front of your classroom and you wouldn’t have been able to pay attention. Your pants are ever-so-slightly tighter than usual and you really can’t stop thinking about Nicolaj Jensen. It’s kind of disturbing, and definitely distracting. You don’t have the extra brain-power to spare sifting through all those tangled emotions right now. You huff and start tearing up the bottom of your worksheet again. You practically tutored Daerek through this class last summer, what’s the harm in paying zero attention during your final and most crucial year of high school? 

With every crease you fold into a tiny paper cube, you force yourself to think something through. Something small. You start with: is Nicolaj Jensen attractive? It immediately feels way too big to even start considering, so you break it down even further. Do you like being around Nicolaj Jensen? The answer is obviously yes. He makes you laugh, he’s consistently fascinating, he’s too weird for you not to be drawn to him. You love beacons of quirkiness. _Because they remind you of the biggest, goofiest personality you’ve ever known?_

Without meaning to, you crush the beginnings of a perfectly good cube between your fingers. This is not the constructive introspection you were looking for. You just want one thing, one fucking thing, to yourself. A single, individual problem that your mind doesn’t find a way to loop back to Will. And how fucked is that anyway? To even consider? You strip off another bit of paper and change tact. Forget the theme of Jensen, you are meditating on “How Fucked Is That, Anyway?”

So, you think bitterly. You are struggling with strange, small sexual feelings towards a pasty Danish computer geek with these genuinely hypnotic eyes that land somewhere between cold and inviting. And a smile that feels, beyond everything else, like it smacks of danger. You are intrigued. You don’t know on what level. But you still feel the need to subconsciously bring your dead childhood friend into it. _How Fucked Is That, Anyway?_ Your brain choruses glibly like a bored game-show audience. 

You can feel a migraine bubbling up somewhere just behind your left ear, but you press on with the second cube. Will and Jensen are linked in the pathways of your mind. You suppose there are a bunch of parallels: computers, unpredictable personalities, previous loneliness. Sexual attraction? It seems gross to consider it now. Will was fifteen, you can’t even begin to put those feelings together in retrospect. But you remember this feeling of nauseousness, of insecurity and your palms being too sweaty all the time. You felt like this around Jena, too.

The third cube goes splat in your hands and you don’t want to start another. Forcing thoughts through your head like a jammed conveyor belt is tiring, and depressing. It makes you feel… Unfixable. Like if you can’t sift through all the hot garbage that fills your head to the point it may as well start spilling out of your ears, then no one can. If no one can understand you, then no one can help you. No one can heal you. It’s your task to bear alone. For once, you don’t hate the sound of that. You’re tired of pushing people away, and demanding that they try to absorb all this fucked up stuff in your head. You lay pad of your thumb across the only standing cube, and squish it into the plastic of the desk. Before you can even sweep up the graveyard of paper tidbits around you, the bell rings again.

You spend two hours in a Chemistry lab trying to feel nothing at all.

Hai is waiting for you by your locker when you are finally released from your prison of gross emotions, and he pounces the moment you come into range for interrogation.

“Yo! So… Is he gonna do it?” He bounds up to you, so full of energy he doesn’t even seem to care about having to backtrack to where he came from, leaning against the locker next to yours. You search your mind for a time in the last school year where he has met you here, or even when you have told him where your locker is, and pull a blank. A part of you wants to ask, but mostly you don’t want to know how he figured out where to find you.

“He’s in. Said if we need help with anything else he’ll do that as well. I think he fancies himself as a bit of a detective.” You smirk to yourself as you decant your algebra and chemistry textbooks into the dusty depths of the locker.

Hai slaps your back in a fit of optimism. “Fucking sick man. Good job. We’re all detectives at the moment, my dude. I’m walking home your way.”

You squint at him as you slam the door and spin the lock, sealing the locker for another day. “But… It’s in the complete opposite direction to where you live.”

“I want to ask you some questions, and I want to snoop around the area a bit. Some geographical profiling.” 

“You literally just pulled that phrase out of your ass.”

“Maybe so, but I still wanna do it. Try and figure out _where_ Will could have gone.”

“It’s not the worst idea you’ve had.” You acquiesce as you begin to stroll out into the sunshine together. The quad is packed, but the two of you weave through the crowds shoulder to shoulder as Hai tips his head back and chortles.

“Nope, that laurel still belongs to letting An cut my hair that one time.”

You can’t help but giggle at the memory of that particular disaster, that had culminated in Hai coming to school the next week with a deeply unflattering crew cut. You wish you had pictures, but you’re 99% sure Hai dedicated the following summer to destroying any and all evidence of that month-long period of his life. 

“What a glorious time to be alive.” You sigh, swerving your face around an airborne frisbee as the throngs of students begin to thin.

“For some of us. Christ, I almost had to start high school looking like that.”

You snort again, pitching your voice falsetto. “Oh, I thought it really brought out your bone structure! Really made your eyes pop-”

“Yeah, out of my skull every time I looked in a mirror. Because I couldn’t believe how much I resembled a bald-ass potato.” Hai interrupts you.

You laugh properly at that, and it takes you until you reach the field to subdue your giggles. 

Hai’s demeanor shifts and you hear the ostentatious click of a tape recorder beginning. A part of you seriously can’t believe he hasn’t gone digital yet, but the other half totally can so you don’t butt in as he starts talking, his tone all business now. “Okay Zach, I know you’ve gone through this a million times. But, the day Will went missing.”

“We walked home from school together, this exact route.”

“Did he seem… Stressed? Off at all?” Hai needles gently. You wish you had something, anything to give him.

You shake your head with a frustrated exhale. “Ever since Turley showed us that profile I’ve been wracking my brain extra-hard, trying to think of any little thing, any _tiny_ tell that something was up. I really can’t find one though. We walked back to here, Will said bye and that he could call me later.”

“And?”

“I got a call from him at… Half nine? Maybe? But I missed it. Could have made all the difference if I didn’t.” You mumble, the well of self-hatred at the pit of your stomach nowhere near done with you today. It froths as you imagine Will calling you, frantically telling you where he is. You could have got your mom and dad, hell the whole fucking police department there within twenty minutes. It could have all been a freak accident closely averted, that you never talk about any more because it makes your gut feel all twisty to think about what could have happened. 

Hai barges through your train of thoughts with his own. “Or it could have made zero difference and we’d be back in this exact position. Counterfactual history is a waste of time. Who cares about what difference it could have made? You were right about what you said yesterday, about not being scared of the past. I should have pushed this investigation so long ago, but I was afraid of what I might find. Hell, I still am.” The field gives way to the tip of your neighbourhood, but Hai presses on with his speech. “I’ve decided that it doesn’t matter anymore, what I feel. It’s about the truth. I owe Will the truth. I owe Will justice. And I never, ever leave a debt unpaid. Even if the indebted person is nowhere to be found, he’s only nowhere to be found _so far.”_

You have reached the top of your road, and for the second time today someone is talking about debts and you are fresh out of words to offer in response. Hai has always been an intense human being. It’s what drives a person to make a binder for everything they care about, and argue about stationary, and sabotage their indirect rivals, and solve a mystery even if it kills them. As you watch Hai stare up at the Hartman’s empty home, his mouth mashed into a determined line and eyes ablaze, you really hope it doesn’t kill him. You have always had a private suspicion that someday, Hai might harness his powers for good. And it might really make a difference somewhere.

He speaks, rousing you from your thoughts. His voice is level and calm. “Okay, I’m going to go for a little wander, take some notes. I’ll see you later.”

“Bye dude.” You respond with what you hope is an encouraging smile and begin to meander the remaining hundred metres to your house. You had forgotten how nice it was to not walk home alone every day. 

You’re over halfway there before Hai calls back to you. “Oh, and Zach? Do you still play that Legends game?”

“League of Legends?” You respond slowly.

“Yeah! Let’s play that tonight. It’s been ages.” Hai grins unabashedly and you nod, ducking your head to obscure your face. Your smile is massive. You are going to blow this kids fucking socks off with how good you’ve gotten at that game in his absence.

Your home is empty, according to the silence that responds to your call as you get in the door. You gather up the mail and set it on the side before heading up to your room. Once again, only dust motes greet you. You move your laptop onto your desk from where it had been left discarded on your bed, next to the battered purple kite you’d been trying not to look at too closely all weekend.

Your eyes slide slowly between the kite carcass and the bin, but you know deep down you don’t want to toss it in the trash. Some memories are just too sacred, you suppose. Even so, it needs to scootch out of the way of where your mouse mat goes so you grab it. A shock of electricity lances up your arm and you gasp in shock, dropping it to the floor. Just what you need, something _else_ fucking up your wrist.

****

I gingerly picked up the kite and placed it back on a shelf, embarrassed at my reaction. It had only been a static shock. Even so it tingled painfully. I flexed my fingers and went to shut my bedroom door, hoping it wouldn’t impair my ability to show off my League skills to Hai. As I crossed the room I glanced into the mirror out of habit, spawned from a lifetime of fiddling with an overgrown fringe. Not for the first time in the past week of constant emotional barrage I didn’t recognise what looked back at me. The boy staring back at me was a stranger. It wasn’t me. As in, it literally wasn’t me. I almost fell over because _there was someone standing in my mirror who wasn’t me._ It was someone taller, with darker hair, red in the face from yelling. He was banging on the other side of the glass. 

I froze, stock-still. My jaw just straight up bounced open. I didn’t know which way was up.

He stopped yelling.

And starting grinning instead, frantically pointing from himself to me he as mouthed the words _”CAN YOU SEE ME??”_ I meant to nod my head yes, but instead my eyes rolled to the back of head and I fainted, spark-out onto the floor of my room. 

I came round, groggily. I would have happily disregarded my visions of the boy stuck in my mirror as a some strange fever-dream, maybe eating something weird. Contaminated with chemical waste, perhaps. Acid in the drinking water wasn’t impossible. It happened in Salem. I slowly tried to sit up and check the mirror. It was blank besides myself staring back at me, pale and shaking. I stared at myself in the eyes, trying to gauge whether I was actually losing my mind or not. I shook my head as someone cleared their throat from next to me. I yelped and recoiled when I realised the mirage I had seen had materialised next to me. He was in my room now, cross-legged sat on the ground and looking very real. My brain was clogged trying to think of the best way to cope with a home-invasion, where my sister’s Little League bat was, should I get a kitchen knife?

The other boy just giggled. “Are you okay? I would have tried to catch you but-” He waved his arms around in a way that was probably supposed to illustrate something. 

His brow furrowed and my head swam. “You can still see me right?”

I thought about fainting again, my vision blurred out but the sound of his voice kept me there, like a life-jacket dragging me to the surface of a vast ocean. The voice was familiar, so familiar. I had heard it in my sleep every night and in my imagination every day that week. My mind was bending, struggling to put together all of the pieces into something that made sense. I looked up at what I had previously thought to be a stranger. 

His hair was dark, the dye long washed out. He was older, his jaw squarer and nose more aquiline. He wasn’t wearing his glasses either. I couldn’t breathe at all. He smiled at me, and I cannot imagine what my face looked like in that moment. I felt everything. I couldn’t even begin to express anything.

“...W-Will?” I choked out.

“Oh sweet. Yeah it’s me dude, what up?”

He smiled again and I sat bolt upright, ignoring how the world staggered around me as I did so. 

“What’s up?!” I barked, “what do you mean ‘what’s up’? Where have you been, how did you-”

I couldn’t put together any of these pieces right now- I lashed out. I meant to shove him by his solar plexus, the first thing I felt raw fury. My anger melted into horror and confusion as my hand passed through his chest like it was water. I froze, gaping. I stared at him. That was when I realised Will was present, but a little hazy. Not the kind of hazy he had been at Daerek’s fifteenth birthday party, but rather his edges were blurred a little, like where he bled into reality was a little indistinct. Also my wrist was sticking clean through his chest cavity like it didn’t even exist. A thousand things, including screams, appeals to God and a soft exhalation as I fainted again, all stuck in my throat until I managed to choke out the Million Dollar Question. 

“Will… Are you a ghost?” I spluttered, overwhelmed.

He just grinned again at first. Like an absolute fucking goon. And it was like fucking _sunshine._ How arrogant I had been to think that Will’s smile could fit inside my memories, like I held up a mirror to reality. His eyes screwed up and his mouth spread wide and my stomach just started free-falling. This was crazy. This couldn’t be real. But despite all rationality Will Hartman was sitting next to me, rumpling his hair with his hand, smiling a little sheepishly. 

“Honestly, I have no idea what the fuck is going on. I woke up… Four days ago maybe? Been trying to get your attention ever since.”

“Woke up?” I frowned. There’s no way that adds up. “Four days… Will you’ve been gone for like, four years.”

He shrugged. “Yeah I know, I’ve had the whole crisis over that as soon as I figured out what the date was. Then I wandered around a bit down in town and then I watched my own memorial service, which was creepy as fuck but kind of gratifying in a weird way. You didn’t cry nearly as much as I expected.”

I knew deep down it was a joke. If he ‘woke up’ four days ago, the last time he remembers seeing me is four days ago. That he had no idea what it had been like, but even so my jaw slackened with disbelief. “Fuck you,” I muttered. I didn’t mean it. I wondered how different I seemed to him, all old and sombre.

His face creased with disappointment. “I was joking man, c’mon-”

“No, I don’t know what’s been going on with you, but the last few years have fucking sucked Will.” I ploughed on. I didn’t want to linger on this for long, or wish this crazy thing out of existence, but I couldn’t pretend that I had been okay, or like all the pain that I had harboured inside me for the past three years had evaporated in the past fifteen seconds.

Will threw his hands in the air, “I’ve been dead! Or at least something very much like death! The last big thing I remember before four days ago is us getting home from school, and then, nothing.”

I took a deep breath, already prepared to undo what I had said. I mean Christ, what better way to welcome your best friend to back beyond the veil by being a dick to him? “I didn’t mean that, this is just so much for me to try to process right now. I don’t even know where to start.”

“Imagine how I felt! I watched my own eulogy being read! The shitty orchestra played - for me! I had to watch you sit there. I had to watch Hai and Daerek and An sit there.” He pressed his mouth into a taut line. I knew like muscle memory that this was step one of Will getting tearful. Next would be the whine in his throat. “I had to watch my mom cry at my grave. Talk to what she thinks is my final resting place about how she is, how much she misses me.” His voice was thickening with emotion. “Over the past four days, I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that whatever I am, I’ve lost three years of my life.”

I reached out to touch his arm, but realised that would be fruitless considering the current situation. My touch wilted in the air, unspent as I spoke. “Will, I’m sorry. For snapping. I have a bunch of emotions running through me right now.”

“No I’m sorry too, I shouldn’t have… Trivialised what you’ve been through.” He looked up at me from his hands, shyly almost. “Are you still happy to see me?”

“Definitely.” You confirm. “Also terrified, confused by the abomination of nature that you appear to be-” 

“You think I’ve got cuter, don’t you?” He interjected, pouting.

I ploughed on with my growing list, ignoring his teasing even though it made a light glow inside me I hadn’t even noticed was dormant. “I’m relieved, I’m worried, I want to figure out how to get you normal again, I’m scared that isn’t going to be possible, my brain is really struggling to compute this against all the insisting I had to do that you weren’t going to come back-”

“Zach! Chill.” My heart spluttered and turned over. I had genuinely thought I would never hear that voice say my name again. It was like another shock of electricity. “I’m here now. That’s… Something, right?”

“It’s a lot.” I replied weakly. 

Will smiled. “I really wish I could hug you right now, but I don’t think I can.” 

“Super immaterial huh?” I asked, experimentally prodding at his knee closest to me with a finger. Just like before, he shimmered a little like a mirage but my hand stubbornly refused to find purchase on anything corporeal.

“Totally. Totally not an excuse to grope me though, Scuderi.” Will laughed. “I did kind of touch you. I grabbed the kite at the same time as you, by your hand. Turns out that’s the best way to transcend into the physical realm is to get hella gay.”

I laughed but it stuck a tiny bit in my throat, on something dark and selfish that realised Will still thought I was ignorant about his mystery man. I pushed past it, it barely even seemed important right now. Will wasn’t dead. Will didn’t seem to be 100% alive either, but that’s still a pretty gigantic improvement. “Shut the fuck up and preferably don’t get into the habit of electrocuting me for attention.” I snickered, looking over him again searching for some clue as to where he had been for the past four years. His clothes were plain black and I don’t remember anything resembling them in his closet before. There was another big change as well.

“Where’d your hair go?” I asked as I picked myself up off the ground, mildly embarrassed by my swooning, but hey it’s not like there’s an appropriate code of conduct for the situation of “My Best Friend Who I Thought Was Dead Steps Out Of My Mirror To Ask What’s Up”.

Will stared at me for a long moment, like I had just asked him how long he had growing that third arm for. “Uh. It’s on my head Zach. I’ve actually got more hair then I remember-” He patted his hair a little self-consciously. Something about the bashfulness of it made my heart twist, but I dutifully tuned it out.

“I meant your hair _dye_ asshole!” I retorted, sitting on the side of my bed.

Will stuck his tongue out and sat next to me. “Oh! I have literally no idea. I guess it… Grew out?”

I kind of couldn’t breathe, my mouth running away with my thoughts. “Hair can’t grow out of a corpse. If your hair’s been growing, like, I don’t want to get your hopes up-”

“I have been hoping that I’m not actually dead for a while now, and now that you’ve noticed me-”

I couldn’t help but interject out of habit. “Finally noticed by your senpai, huh?”

“What has Hai done to you in my absence? You poor, sweet, summer weeb. But honestly my hopes are pretty raised at the moment. It’s be positive or resign myself to haunting the shit out of the school computer lab for the rest of my life. Well, not-life.” Will finished his rant with a deep breath. I tried not to laugh as I stretched out and noticed he was floating about an inch off my duvet.

“That was you? Who fucked with my computer?”

“Well, duh. When I said ‘trying to get your attention’ I mean literally following you around, yelling at you and trying to interact with anything I can that you’re interacting with. Electricity seems to be the thing that works best.”

“As opposed to?”

“Um, trying to throw things in your direction-”

“Dick.”

“-Jacking off in your room whilst you sleep-”

_”WHAT!”_

I stood up and rounded on Will, who had a shit-eating expression on his face. He was clearly having a ball right now. In fairness, I was too. I could remember that exact look on his face as a boy, and now here he was as a man. A face transposed through time and space, and potentially the veil of death, to come here and take the piss out of me. He kept talking as I stared, all my joking chagrin melted as the reality of what could be happening here started to set in.

“And at one point I actually let your mom hit me with a car. Kind of got all Groundhog Day. Of course it all went right through me. Only two of those things are true, by the way. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which.”

I reigned in my snickers and composed myself. “Okay but important stuff. Really important stuff-”

Will swung his legs and stood to attention in front of me, but immediately started goofing off again. Dead people didn’t grow what seemed to be a million inches in four years. The thought made my heart jolt so abruptly I didn’t even snark back at Will as he gestured towards the distance between us now we were both standing.

“Whoops, hello Mr Height Difference. It appears that you haven’t changed a bit in my absence.”

“Did you just assume our height difference’s gender?” I asked, really struggling not to get dragged down into Will’s infectious silliness. I felt giddy. 

He just rolled his eyes. “Why would the height difference of two dudes, not be male? That just doesn’t make any sense.”

I groped for a silly comeback, but my need to sass was overtaken by a laugh. A massive, bubbling laugh that forced it’s way out of me in reaction to the sheer improbability, no _impossibility_ of what was happening. “Sorry, this is so weird. You’re so the same, but also not.” I found myself saying, trying not to let my eyes mist up.

“Wow, you haven’t lost your poetic touch at all in your absence.”

I flipped him off and we both laughed again. I felt like I was floating. Although, Will was actually floating. Like two inches off the ground. I was about to point out that maybe our height difference wasn’t quite as severe as anticipated, but Will cut across me.

“Your haircut looks really cute.” He said in a soft voice.

I blushed, and choked, and decided the only way I would get out of this alive is to run with ‘brash’. “Yours looks dumb. You in your entirety look dumb. Wait, where are your glasses?”

Will didn’t seem to mind my abrupt change of subject, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. “Sorry, I’m too dumb to remember where I left them! And, again, I actually have no idea. I’m just getting the hang of manifesting a body. For a while back there I was just kind of a… cloud of consciousness.”

“That is so fucking weird.” I breathed, imagining a weird mist of Will, drifting around town muttering dick jokes in the ears of passers-by. 

Will snickered. “Um. What about this isn’t super fucking weird though? I m-”

He was cut off my a rap on my door. On instinct I tried to grab his arm. Like before, my hand closed around nothing and he glared at me as I awkwardly stood there with my wrist sticking out of him. 

“Zach? Honey? Are you on the phone?” My mom called from just outside the door.

I started to panic for a moment about explaining what was going on, but then I remembered how much effort it had taken Will to become visible to me. He just scowled at me. “Dude. Have some respect for my personal space, would you? Just because I have this hot incorporeal bod at my disposal doesn’t make me an object.”

“Yeah I’m just talking to Hai, mom!” I shouted back in response, fishing my hand out of Will and waving it at him to be quiet.

“Okay well wrap it up quick, dinner’s on the table!”

I waited until I heard her steps down the stairs before I turned to Will. “Okay, I gotta go eat. Wait here for me?”

“Are you kidding me? It literally just occurred to me that no one can see me but you. You have any idea the fun I’m going to have with this? This is the pranking paradise I have always dreamed of. You know, maybe I am dead. Because this is as close as I can conceive to heaven.”

*******

Zach took the steps down the stairs one at a time, trying to force himself to stop smiling. He had no words, absolutely none, that could begin to capture how he was feeling, so where his mind fizzled, his body began. He felt hot and tingly, adrenaline still lapping at the heels of his pulse and making it run at a breakneck pace. He dipped at the last second before the dining room and locked himself inside the toilet. 

Looking in the mirror, his face looked way redder and shinier than usual. His uncontrollable smile was actually starting to creep _him_ out, so he didn’t want to think about how weird he would look to his family. Zach forced himself to take a few big breaths and splash water on his face. If worse came to worst, he could pull some weird lie out of his ass about why he looked so pleased. Say something good happened in a game. That always put his parents right off prying; they’d given up trying to understand video games and his relationship with them a very long time ago.

He cleared his throat, unbolted the door and went to sit down with his loving family who had no clue what kind of crazy fucking shenanigans were unfolding in his life right now.

“So, Zach. All good at school?” His dad asked, only allowing him two bites of his dinner in silence.

“Yeah.” He said whilst trying to swallow down a mostly-chewed mouthful. “It’s decent. My Computing project has like… twenty percent of it left to do I’d say? Algebra and English are both boring but fine, and I think I’m gonna be able to finish Chem with a good grade. Plus they stopped making me do gym and social studies after the beginning of the year, which rocks.”

He ate another few mouthfuls of mashed potato before looking up. His whole family were staring at him. 

“...What?” Zach asked.

“Nothing,” his mom replied, something unplaceable in her voice. “I’m just used to hearing ‘fine’, and that’s it. You’re really talkative this evening Zach.”

“Oh, uh sorry-”

“Don’t apologise, son.” Zach was taken aback by the intensity in his father’s voice before he straightened his tie, cleared his throat, and continued talking in a more measured tone. “I’m really glad to see you in a good mood. And nice work with Chemistry, I remember how much you used to hate it.”

“Hah, yeah. Nothing like a super-accomplished lab partner to save your butt, huh?” He joked, trying to reign this conversation back into the realms of normal. 

Emily peered at him, as scrutinizingly as an eleven year old can. “Zach, did you get a girlfriend?”

His parents both laughed and he choked on his mouthful, glaring at Emily as he sipped at his water, trying to keep his stomach lining inside him. 

“Sooo, Zach.” A voice came floating from above him. “Is she cute?” 

Zach coughed a few times, blinking the tears out his eyes and resolutely deciding to ignore the everliving fuck out of Will.

“No!” He croaked out eventually. “I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“Well… Boyfriends are fine too, Zach.” His mom said sincerely. 

“I don’t have a boyfriend either!” He exclaimed. In his peripheral vision he could see Will sticking his head through the ceiling, looking pretty close to laughing it off.

“But if you did,” his dad began matter-of-factly, “we would never think of you any differently.” 

“Yeah, Zachy-poo,” Will snickered down at him. “It’s A-okay to be gay!”

Zach used all of his self-control to avoid looking up at Will and instead engaged with his family, on a mission to put out this spreading fire. “Mom, dad, Emily. I’m not gay. Or, I don’t think I’m gay. I don’t know, I haven’t really put any thought into it. I’m not exactly big on dating right now. Thank you for… Supporting me, but there’s not really anything to support. I just want to finish high school.” 

_Graduate, get out of Kansas, learn to breathe, get laid._ His old mantra floated back to him as he reiterated step one. It still sounded like the right thing to do, but it lacked a certain ‘oomph’ now. Between the present, graduating and ‘get out of Kansas’ he had a new thousand things to do, not limited to resurrecting his best friend from the semi-dead. The future felt weightless, because all the important stuff was right there. 

His family just laughed and kept eating, conversation drifting onto Emily and her deeply dramatic final year of Maryville Elementary School. He tried his utmost to pay no attention to Will, who’s head was still sticking through his ceiling.

“From now on I’m just gonna refer to you as Zachary “I don’t think I’m gay” Scuderi, in every possible situation, oh my God.”

It was difficult for him not to retort, so he just smothered his laugh, played it off as coughing and tried to eat his food as quickly as possible before excusing himself upstairs, managing to shoot a beaming Will a death-glare as he put his plate away.

Coming back up he took the stairs three at a time and when he burst into his room Will was sitting, well floating just above, his bed again. Grinning like the Cheshire Cat.

“I wish I could punch you right now.” Zach said, “you… Anus.” 

“I’m sorry! I just couldn’t resist gate crashing a little bit… Man Emily’s grown up to take no shit, huh?”

“She’ll rule over all of us, someday.” He replied flatly. “Her or Hai, I can’t tell which yet.”

“Oooooh Emily Scuderi vs Hai Lam in a vicious duel to the death? I’d watch that.”

Zach laughed at the mental image as he absent-mindedly tidied some stale lingering undergarments into his hamper. “She’d fucking dunk his ass dude! Nah, it’d have to be all sneaking and subterfuge.”

“That’s some Game of Thrones shit, dude! Say, did that show ever take off in the end?”

Zach froze and turned slowly to face him. “Oh my God. You’ve completely missed out on _culture_ for the last three years. Will. Holy shit, dude. You have some major catching up to do.”

Rather than standing, Will just hovered a bit higher so he was at eye-level with Zach. They couldn’t help but both crease into laughter. “Catch me up, Scotty.” Will grinned.

They only managed to watch four episodes before Zach called time on the marathon, falling asleep for ten minute snatches at four separate points.

“I’m exhausted dude, and I have school tomorrow! Wait. Will… do you sleep?” Zach asked awkwardly.

“I’m a being made up of pure electromagnetic bullshit from what I can tell, I also have no physical body and interacting with the world is super fucking difficult.” Will retorted.

Zach stared.

“No I don’t sleep. I kind of zone out for a few hours during the night usually though? Just like.. Chillax and meditate I guess.”

“Yeah, you seem super-zen at the moment.”

“Hey, if Buddha could see me now, he’d be so gassed. I have surpassed the material world, my dude!” He stretched out and hovered in midair, to demonstrate his point Zach assumed.

“No offense but could you lie on the ground? If I wake up in the night and accidentally walk through your floating torso trying to go to the bathroom, I will majorly shit.”

Will sighed. “You always did like me on the bottom, huh.”

Zach felt an honest-to-god snicker bubble up in his chest. He had forgotten what proper best friend quality banter felt like. Even if his best friend was currently manifesting as a... ghost? His brain just put a pin in all of that (probably highly important) business. He was just soaking up Will’s presence, no matter how unconventional his reappearance was. 

“So, I need to get changed.” He began.

“Say no more, bud.” Will put his hands over his eyes. “I promise I won’t peek.”

“Will.” Zach frowned. “I can see from here that your hands are mostly translucent. Fucking, turn around.”

“JEEZ aye aye captain. Sorry, but you not wanting me to see you naked only adds clout to my theory that every sexual organ on your body is a butthole.” Will chatted nonsense as he faced the wall and Zach put on a t-shirt and fresh boxers to sleep in as fast as physically possible.

“Do you listen to half the stuff that comes out of your mouth?” Zach asked as he sat down in bed and started to mess the sheets into a comfortable nest.

“Generally no, especially not now that I can _finally_ talk to someone.”

Will spread out and stretched on the floor next to him. “Good night, Zach.” He mumbled. “It feels really good to be back.”

Zach just pretended to be asleep so he wouldn’t accidentally say something humilitating. He couldn’t actually drift off immediately though. It was hard for Zach not to examine Will a little bit whilst he ‘chillaxed’. It sure looked like sleeping to him. His face was the same, the same bone structure, the same cluster of freckles on his cheek that faintly formed the Big Dipper if you joined them up. He remembered drawing it on in felt tip pen when they were kids and Will had expressed how much he hated them. Zach had drawn the Big Dipper and explained the best he could that constellations were special and pretty. He cringed a bit thinking about it now, as a nine-year-old indirectly calling your best friend pretty was acceptable, thinking it basically a decade later was not so much. And Will wasn’t pretty now. _He’s handsome_ Zach’s mind hissed at him. He tried to ignore it, analysing what had changed, what was the same, what he could pick out from his extensive catalogue labelled ‘Will’ that he had long sealed up mentally. He had the same wide lips and aquiline nose, but now they fit his face as whole a lot better. Zach figured it was proportions, that’s all. His hair was shorter, and as a result it curled a lot less. It looked much less fluffy now that only a few hairs trailed around the nape of his neck. It still stuck out at strange angles, like phantom cowlicks of his previous haircut. Will’s natural hair had kind of been subsumed in Zach’s mind by all the memories (‘missing’ posters, dating profiles,) of his hair blonde. That and the lack of glasses meant that the emphasis of Will’s face had shifted, the focal point was no longer the blaring barriers but the soft curl of his top lip, his cheekbones, the naturally sleepy curve of his eyelids. Green eyes, with hazel in the left one. Zach tried not to note enviously that he had a dusting of dark stubble. It wasn’t particularly impressive, but it was more than puberty had mustered for him. He couldn’t peg whether Will’s face looked softer or harder now. Generally his features were much more… Defined? Zach decided that was the best word. He also decided that staring at someone who wasn’t actually sleeping was kind of weird. Especially when it was your previously-dead but kind of not-dead childhood and adolescent best friend who’s apparent-death you had been mourning for four years, who was currently existing in some kind of limbo-death-zone.

But that wasn’t what was important; the crucial part would be making a plan, solving this mystery, and getting to the bottom of all of this. And trying to appear not entirely crazy whilst doing so. Zach realised then and there he was going to have to enlist some help, but for now it made him feel something strange and implacable to know that Will had dedicated himself to getting _his_ attention when he could have picked any of them. He fell asleep watching the eerily still way that Will hovered above the carpet, ironically, like he was dead.


End file.
